Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Chapter One: LENIN’S RETURN
Lenin Reloaded
Lenin Rediscovered
American Revolutionary
Lenin Lives
Chapter Two: ONE FOR THE ENCYCLOPEDIAS
The Making of a Revolutionary
The Rise of Bolshevism
From the 1905 Revolution to 1914
Imperialist World War
The Fall of Tsarism and the Rise of “Dual
Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War
From “War Communism” to New Economic Polic
Lenin’s Final Defeat and Legacy
Chapter Three: TRAVESTIES, STATUES,AND LAUGHTER
Chapter Four: STILL KICKING: LENIN AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS
Bad Man
Scholarly Gems
Hazards of Scholarly Balance
Taking Lenin Seriously
Problems of a Revolutionary Life
Revolutionary Tragedy
Humanity and Revolution
 Chapter Five: LENIN AND REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY
Lenin and His Revolution
The Bolshevik Mystique
Bolshevism and Its Opposite
Seeds of Stalinism
Leninism versus Stalinism
The Saving Remnant
Chapter Six: THE GREAT LENIN DEBATE OF 2012
Methodology for Historians and Marxists
The Activist Approach:Advantages and Disad
Creating Bolshevism
Lessons for Our Time (and Non-Lessons)
Facing Problems
Chapter Seven: ENDURING LEGACY
Quibble #1: Mandel’s “Luxemburgist” Lenin
Quibble #2:Lenin as a “Loyal Follower” of
Quibble #3:There Is No Real “Leninism”?
Post versus Post
What Is to Be Done?
Chapter Eight: LUXEMBURG AND LENIN THROUGH EACH
OTHER’S EYES
Personal Relationship
Nationalism and Imperialism
Revolutionary Organization and Mass Action
Democracy and Revolution
Chapter Nine: CAUTION: ACTIVISTS USING LENIN
Checking In with Marx and Engels
The Russian and US Experience
Fatal Illusions
Where We Are
 What Not to Do
What to Do
Chapter Ten: LENINISM IS UNFINISHED
The British SWP
Is Leninism Finished?
Revolutionary Vanguard and Mass Struggle
Boundaries of Democratic Centralism
Unfinished Leninism
Chapter Eleven: LENINISM FOR DANGEROUS TIMES
Moving Forward to Builda Mass Socialist Mo
The Poetry of Dialectics
Beyond “Monopolism”
What We Believe In
Chapter Twelve: ORGANIZING FOR TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY
SOCIALISM: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF LENINISM
Leninism’s Meaning and Value
Lenin’s Comrades
Communist International
Internationalism in Our Own Time
From Small Groups to Mass Parties
Principled Flexibility
The Centrality of Democracy
Internal Culture and Cadre Development
Taking Power to Bring About Socialism
NOTES
About the Author
 First published by Haymarket Books in 2014
© 2014 Paul Le Blanc

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To those, now gone, who taught me about Leninism, to those, very much
here, who might make good use of it, and to those yet to come . . .
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among those whom I must thank, for various kinds of supportiveness around my
engagement with the ideas (and the sharing of their own ideas) reflected in these
essays, over the past several years, are: Anthony Arnove, Sebastian Budgen,
Tom Bias, Sandra Bloodworth, Roland Boer, Peter Boyle, David Castle, Kunal
Chattopadhyay, Luke Cooper, Ted Crawford, Paul D’Amato, Neil Davidson,
Alexy Gusev, Shaun Harkin, Jonathan Harris, He Ping, Brian Jones, Geoffroy de
Laforcade, Li Dianlai, Lars Lih, Michael Löwy, Soma Marik, Kevin Murphy,
Manny Ness, Benjamin Opratko, John Rees, John Riddell, Pierre Rousset, Helen
Scott, Ahmed Shawki, George Shriver, Ashley Smith, Debbie Smith, Michael
Smith, Sharon Smith, Hillel Ticktin, Terry Townsend, Tom Twiss, Nat
Weinstein, Suzanne Weiss, Susan Weissman, Wu Xinwei, Xiong Min, Michael
Yates, and Dave Zirin. Special thanks for the thoughtful and helpful editorial
work by Dao Tran. (Apologies for the incompleteness of this list.)
I have been sustained in many important ways, as I have labored over these
writings, by my friend Nancy Ferrari, my sisters Patty and Nora Le Blanc, my
sons Gabriel Le Blanc and Jonah McAllister-Erickson, and activist comrades of
six continents who are too numerous to name.
These essays have accumulated, mostly over a six-year period, in ways
indicated below.
“Lenin’s Return” appeared in Working USA: The Journal of Labor and
Society 10, no. 3, September 2007.
“One for the Encyclopedias” was first published in the now defunct Colliers
Encyclopedia in 1995, and a refurbished version appeared in the remarkable
eight-volume International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009). A variant is also included in my introduction to the selection
of Lenin’s writings Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, published by Pluto Press
in 2008.
“Travesties, Statues, and Laughter” came out of a panel discussion at
Princeton University in 2012, after a performance of Tom Stoppard’s play
Travesties, which includes Lenin as a character. The essay first appeared in
International Socialist Review, May–June 2012.
“Still Kicking: Lenin and His Biographers” first appeared in International
Socialist Review, November–December 2012. The title’s word play refers to
Lenin’s influence as “alive and kicking” and to the fact that he is recurrently
kicked by unfriendly biographers.
“Revolutionary Democracy” was first published under the title “Lenin and
Revolutionary Democracy,” in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 38, no. 4,
November 2010. It originated as a paper presented at the Boston Convention of
the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, November
12–15, 2009.
“The Great Lenin Debate of 2012” appeared in the online journal Links,
International Journal of Socialist Renewal, September 1, 2012; it originated as a
presentation given at an educational conference in London of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, August 20–26, 2012.
“Enduring Legacy” first appeared online with the title “The Enduring Value
of Lenin’s Political Thought” at the Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières site on
February 8, 2012, in response to a review by Charles Post of Lars Lih’s
biography Lenin; a few additional comments are added in light of Post’s more
recent essay “What Is Left of Leninism? New European Left Parties in Historical
Perspective,” completed and circulated late in 2012 prior to its publication in
Socialist Register 2013.
“Luxemburg and Lenin Through Each Other’s Eyes” appears here for the first
time, although an abbreviated version was published online in Links,
International Journal of Socialist Renewal, January 3, 2012. It was prepared
(and presented in the abbreviated form) for an international conference, “Lenin’s
Thought in the 21st Century: Interpretation and Its Value,” sponsored by the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, as well as the Department of Philosophy, the
Institute of Marxist Philosophy, and the Institute of Western Marxist Philosophy
at Wuhan University in the People’s Republic of China, October 20–22, 2012.
“Caution: Activists Using Lenin” is published here for the first time. It was
presented at an educational conference of the Communist Party of Great Britain
in London, August 20–26, 2012. It first appeared online as a video on October
16, 2013, under the title “Building a Revolutionary Party in the USA,” on the
website of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
“Leninism Is Unfinished” first appeared in the online version of the US
publication Socialist Worker on February 1, 2013.
“Leninism for Dangerous Times” was presented at the “Dangerous Ideas for
Dangerous Times” conference in London and appeared online at Counterfire,
June 2, 2013, http://www.counterfire .org/index.php/theory/37-theory/16477-
leninism-for-dangerous-times. The additional piece appended to this first
appeared June 23, 2013, on the website of the International Socialist Network at
http://internationalsocialistnetwork.org/index.php/ideas-and-arguments
/organisation/152-paul-le-blanc-moving-forward-to-build-a-mass -socialist-
movement.
“Organizing for Twenty-First Century Socialism” was initially composed for
a seminar of the same name, which took place during June 8–9, 2013, organized
in Sydney, Australia, by Socialist Alliance. It appeared online in Links,
International Journal of Socialist Renewal, June 12, 2013,
http://links.org.au/node/3394.
I have taken the liberty, in this volume, of introducing minor changes in some
of these essays.
INTRODUCTION

As of this writing in 2013, there have been increasingly intense stirrings of

discontent in the face of the deepening problems of global capitalism, an
extended upsurge of protest and insurgency, and yet a sense of disappointment
and frustration as the problems of global capitalism persist. One can find as
synonyms for the word doctrine either dogma or guidelines—and the rising tide
of young activists today, having little appetite for dogma, are increasingly
seeking guidelines for their efforts.
Conservative and neoliberal policies, social-liberal and social-democratic
reformism, Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, the individualist dissidence of
libertarians and anarchists, and ideologies less defined have all failed to
eliminate the problems—so the discontent persists, spreads, and deepens. This is
the case in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. It is the case
throughout Europe. It is the case from South Africa to Egypt and throughout the
Middle East. It is the case in India and in China. There is a need—a “market”—
for ideas that address this reality. This has caused, as I have been arguing for the
past few years, a significant uptick, a renewal among scholars and intellectuals
and activists, of interest in and studies of the ideas and the long-ago activities of
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—known to the world as Lenin—and of his early
twentieth-century comrades.
Back in 1989, as what passed for “Communism” seemed to be disintegrating
throughout the world, an old friend accused me, with considerable exasperation,
of being “the last Leninist.” Not really true then, it is even less so today. This
fact finds reflection in the growth of what might be called “Lenin studies.”
Among the examples of this phenomenon (in addition to my own modest efforts)
are the essays gathered in the 2007 volume edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis
Kouvalakis, and Slavoj Žižek entitled Lenin Reloaded, putting forward the work
of an impressive and diverse collection of scholars and intellectuals. One can
also find more of the same in the impressive British journal Historical
Materialism and the flood of books it has been providing over the past several
years.
There are also the Herculean efforts of John Riddell and his collaborators in
making available, and helping to popularize, in multiple volumes, the
remarkable proceedings of the early Communist International, which Lenin
helped to found and lead. One of the earliest innovators was Kevin Anderson,
whose Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism helped pave the way for taking
Lenin’s thought more seriously than was common in the era of the so-called
collapse of Communism. From India we have the revolutionary feminist Soma
Marik, whose impressive study Reinterrogating the Classical Marxists
Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy focuses its attention on Lenin and his
Bolshevik Revolution.
A retrieval of the profoundly democratic qualities of Lenin and Bolshevism
and an exploration of how these were shattered under the impact of historical
calamities were offered in Arno J. Mayer’s magisterial work The Furies:
Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions.
One of the most powerful and penetrating contributions has been Lars Lih’s
massive work Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context. We
should also note some of the new studies of the Hegelian Leninists of Western
Marxism, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács also fit into this category, as does
the renewed scholarly interest in Leon Trotsky. The growing work on and
interest in Rosa Luxemburg is also part of this phenomenon. As I will argue later
in this volume, it is a mistake to portray Lenin and Luxemburg as opponents—
despite real and important differences, they can more accurately be seen as close
comrades and cothinkers in the project of the workers’ revolution for socialist
democracy.
It is not the case that Lenin is simply of scholarly interest to me. Lenin was
tough, and he was for the workers. That’s what my father told me when I was in
my early teens, as we drove in a car one summer, while I accompanied him on
one of his many trips as a union organizer. I was asking about, and he was
explaining, his understanding of how the world was, and the ideas he believed
in. When I asked him about Lenin, that is what he said. Not long after, I read a
few of Lenin’s writings in a book by C. Wright Mills, The Marxists, and then
The State and Revolution. A few years after that, as a New Left activist who felt
a need to find more ideas, better ideas, on how to struggle for positive social
change, I began reading more Lenin—What Is to Be Done? to start with, and
then more and more of his writings, and also about Lenin’s life and times.
When I was a young militant in the Socialist Workers Party, which at the time
was the leading Trotskyist organization in the United States my reading
continued, and was linked with practical experience. When I was thirty-five
years old, and very bad things were happening in that organization, one of my
mentors—George Breitman—asked me to write something about Lenin. He
wanted it to be shown that Lenin’s ideas and the quality of his thought were
much better than what was passing for “Leninism” in this deteriorating,
increasingly undemocratic organization. He wanted people—especially young
activists of the future—to understand what was what, and to not be turned off by
Lenin’s ideas because bad things were done in Lenin’s name. In consultation
with George, I wrote Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. He liked it very, very
much, and that made me feel incredibly proud. (He was a working-class
intellectual of high caliber, with a meticulous approach to scholarship.) When
younger activists now tell me that they have read and liked this book, I tell them
that it was written especially for them, which is true. That is also the case with
the essays in this volume.
I have shared much of my life with this person whose life force has made him
like family. I was born thirty years after the 1917 revolution he led. The tremors
and vitality of his example and ideas, of his accomplishments and mistakes, have
continued to animate much of my life almost a hundred years after so many
workers and peasants and students and others reached out with all that they had
to make that revolution. They wanted peace, bread, and land. They wanted to
create a republic in which the political and economic and cultural realities of
society would be ruled by the democratic councils of the laboring majority. They
wanted what Marx had promised—that the free development of each will be
condition for the free development of all. This is what Lenin wanted, and fought
for, and helped others to fight for. And it didn’t happen—in fact, almost the
opposite happened. There has been much to wrestle with as I have tried to make
sense of that, and to sort through, as best I can, what Lenin did, experienced, and
said that might be useful in struggles for a better future.
While the reader can meander through the essays in this volume however she
or he wishes, I have put them in a certain order that makes sense to me. The first
essay introduces Lenin as someone whose relevance for our own time is
becoming increasingly evident. The second offers a succinct account of his life.
The third focuses more on his personality. How various biographers of our
century have dealt with him (many seeing him as the ruthless architect of
totalitarianism, and others not) is the subject of the fourth essay, and the fifth
offers a sustained look at what I believe is the revolutionary-democratic thrust of
his thinking and of what he attempted—contrasted to the horrific dictatorship
that congealed after his death under Joseph Stalin. The sixth essay focuses on
recent controversies (in which I was a participant, with Lars Lih and Pham Binh)
about how Lenin did and did not go about trying to build a revolutionary party—
and it also has something to say about the art and craft of writing history. The
seventh, in a somewhat similar vein, takes up some differences with a prominent
US Marxist analyst, Charles Post, on how (and how not) to understand
“Leninism.” I have known Charlie as a comrade in the socialist movement for
many years, and as is the case with many comrades down through many years,
we are able to take issue with each other on important questions while
continuing to join together in struggles against oppression and exploitation. I see
Rosa Luxemburg as one of the greatest revolutionary socialists ever (Lenin
would have agreed with that, by the way), yet she and Lenin, Marxist comrades
that they were, sometimes sharply differed, and the eighth essay explores that. I
do not believe Lenin and his ideas are merely of historical interest, but his times
were very different than ours—so the ninth essay suggests how his approach
might be useful to activists in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
An unanticipated development in the British Left, generating a storm of
controversy and animated discussion, inspired essays ten and eleven, regarding
the open and necessarily unfinished nature of Leninism, which reflects the nature
of social reality itself, in our dangerous times. More positive developments in
Australia—where potential mergers rather than new splits seemed in the offing
—contributed to the final consideration of what is to be done.
There is more than one way in which Leninism can be understood as being
unfinished. At the very least, there is the continuing stream of scholarship,
adding more information and insights on Lenin, his historical context, and
various aspects of his thought. This precludes the possibility of this volume, or
any volume at this moment, having “the last word” on Lenin and his ideas.
I have already made reference to the still unfinished efforts of John Riddell
and his coworkers in regard to the early Communist International, and there will
be more to expect from Lars Lih and others who are able to make even more
Russian-language sources available to us. Lars and Ben Lewis have recently
made available an important work and partial reassessment of Lenin’s comrade
Gregory Zinoviev (much criticized—in some cases justifiably so—by many) that
may force some rethinking among some inclined to accept him as simply a
whipping-boy for Leninism gone wrong. The writings and initial scholarly
exploration of an important follower of Rosa Luxemburg and pioneer leader of
German Communism Paul Levi (in the volume edited by David Fernbach, In the
Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi), who embraced and
then rejected Lenin, have just begun to be engaged with by serious activist-
scholars.
There are no signs that this will close off any time soon. I have had an
opportunity to read through manuscripts of others—the translation from
Hungarian of an interesting new work by Tamás Krausz, which makes available
Eastern European perspectives and debates on Lenin, a significant interpretation
by Alan Shandro on the notion of hegemony as a distinctive element in Lenin’s
thought, and Roland Boer’s remarkable work Lenin, Religion, and Theology,
published in 2013 (just before the present volume was being prepared), which
will take time to be adequately absorbed into Lenin studies. In addition, August
Nimtz, who has made important contributions on the political thought of Marx
and Engels, has written a major study on Lenin, providing the first scholarly
exploration of Lenin’s quite serious approach to electoral politics in a two-
volume work The “Ballot” or “the Streets”—or Both. There is also a collection,
to be published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in conjunction with Wuhan
University, offering presentations given at an International Conference on Lenin
and His Thought that took place in the People’s Republic of China in 2012.
We can expect much more scholarly work to help us better comprehend Lenin
and Leninism. No less significant, however, will be new applications,
misapplications, and practical political experiences related to Leninism that can
be expected to emerge since there are many around the world who will seek not
simply to interpret reality in various ways—but to change it.
Chapter One
LENIN’S RETURN

This is a review of the following books: Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be

Done?” in Context, by Lars T. Lih (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006); James P.
Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928, by
Bryan D. Palmer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Lenin Reloaded:
Toward a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and
Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
About forty years ago, my great-uncle George Brodsky (now long dead) gave
me an old handbill printed in red ink, issued by District 2 of the Workers Party,
which proclaimed LENIN LIVES! It urged us to “Come En Masse” to Madison
Square Garden to a Sunday afternoon event chaired by Ben Gitlow (a central
leader of US Communism who later devolved into a professional anticommunist
on the far right. The event that included the four-hundred-voice Freiheit Chorus,
a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, and speeches from William Z. Foster,
C. E. Ruthenberg, Moissaye Olgin, and Jack Stachel—for an admission fee of
fifty cents (not a negligible sum in 1925) and with an exhortation at the
handbill’s bottom: LONG LIVE LENINISM!
“Lenin Lives!” He had died, in fact, but was alive in the hearts and minds of
those rallying in Madison Square Garden, alive in the very nature of that
culturally vibrant assemblage, and the relevance of the handbill is reflected in
the three remarkable books above, while also posing sharp questions about the
terrible times in which we live. Consider three films that capture aspects of our
reality as we feel our way toward the close of the new century’s first decade. The
poignant German comedy Goodbye Lenin! (2003)—reflecting on the beautiful,
tarnished, murderously corrupted, deadeningly bureaucratized dreams of the
Communism that proved so utterly unsustainable throughout Eastern Europe—
shows a monstrous statue of Lenin being carried away, through the air, by a
helicopter, as a stunned female Communist-idealist (herself close to premature
death) watches with uncomprehending wonder.
The edgy thriller Syriana (2005) shows us ruthless machinations of
Communism’s triumphant and relentlessly profiteering adversary, as the
corporate-capitalist driven empire “takes out” a thoughtful, progressive, radical-
nationalist of an oil-rich country, perpetuating the global exploitation and misery
of millions, which—in turn, thanks to the absence of revolutionary alternatives
—generates suicidal fundamentalist violence.
Fast forward to the year 2027 portrayed in the uncompromising Children of
Men (2007): in the absence of a socialist alternative (protest movements for
global justice were not enough), the world has begun its downward slide into
barbarism, a vast cemetery, with the final enclave of “civilization” standing as an
increasingly authoritarian and exclusionary (anti-immigrant, anti-refugee) husk
whose inhumanity infects many who struggle against it—but images of Lenin
appear, in the midst of religious icons, in an obscure, nurturing haven of those
who hope and reach for humanity’s future.
But surely the images of Lenin as nurturing hope are misplaced—even
radicals agree with liberals who quote conservatives who assure us that Lenin
was a monster. In his little essay on Lenin in Time/CBS News People of the
Century: One Hundred Men and Women Who Shaped the Last One Hundred
Years, David Remnick explains to us that the great revolutionary held a “view of
man as modeling clay and sought to create a new model of human nature and
behavior through social engineering of the most radical kind,” and he goes on to
quote Richard Pipes that “Bolshevism was the most audacious attempt in history
to subject the entire life of a country to a master plan. It sought to sweep aside as
useless rubbish the wisdom that mankind had accumulated over millennia.” Such
an inhuman approach to humanity inevitably breeds nothing but inhumanity—
unless the liberal/conservative allegation is a lie.
 As my book Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience was about to be
published in 2006, I was unable to shake the feeling that what I was doing in that
book hardly reflected my own thoughts alone. Against what had become so
standard an interpretation of Lenin, as I was writing in the post-9/11 world, it felt
that dominant ideologies were being undermined by political and social crises
that would be generating insurgent forces ready to connect with the ideas of the
“universally” dismissed revolutionary. Perhaps, I thought, we are about to see a
Lenin revival. The appearance, at approximately the same time, of these three
volumes (two of which I was able to quickly take note of on my book’s page
proofs) reinforce that sense.

Lenin Reloaded
Taking the most recent first, Lenin Reloaded presents a remarkable set of essays
by an impressive set of twenty-first-century intellectuals—with contents causing
the working-class child in me to recoil in panic, fearing that I will be too dull-
witted to understand what all these learned people, using strange words and
esoteric allusions, are saying with such apparent fluency. As I labor over what
they have written, I bump into the militant young activist within me who scoffs
at such “over-intellectualizing,” yet the aging scholar in me feels unable to
follow the young comrade’s impatient advice to close this book—in part because
what many of these people are saying is so interesting, so strikingly put, and
(yes) so mind-expanding.
Frederic Jameson, beginning with an account from Trotsky’s 1932 diary of a
dream-conversation with Lenin, describes Lenin’s formidable writings as
coming from a man who is unaware that he is dead—
He doesn’t know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and
which we call Soviet Communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead,
and the vituperation expended on him by the living—that he was the originator of Stalinist terror,
that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and
totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP—none of those
insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, on him. How is it, how can it be, that he
still thinks he is alive?
 This imagery is an eloquent way of stating the simple premise that “Lenin
still means something,” but it gains one’s attention, nonetheless. So does Slavoj
Žižek’s description of a Slovenian Communist who led a heroic uprising in a
fascist prison, an uprising that became part of the mythology of a triumphant
Communist state, a state that then arrested and imprisoned the same man and
assigned him to a forced-labor work brigade that was creating a monument
glorifying the antifascist uprising that he had led—“a perfect metaphor for the
twists of Stalinism.” There is Terry Eagleton’s challenging and clever essay—
with wonderful turns of phrase (he describes Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism, while defending it, as “a work in which one can hear the occasional
gurgling of a man well out of his depth”). Eagleton reflects on Lenin’s much-
maligned notion of a “revolutionary vanguard” (commonly dismissed as the
arrogant elitism of a middle-class intellectual) with this fine point:
Those members of the Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers who fought with James Connolly
against the British imperial state in the Dublin Post Office in 1916 constituted a vanguard. But
this was not because they were middle-class intellectuals—on the contrary, they were mostly
Dublin working men and women—or because they had some innate faculty of superior insight
into human affairs, or because they were in serene possession of the scientific laws of history.
They were a vanguard because of their relational situation—because, like the revolutionary
cultural avant-gardes in contrast with modernist coteries, they saw themselves not as a timeless
elite but as the shock troops or front line of a mass movement. There can be no vanguard in and
for itself, as coteries are by definition in and for themselves. And a vanguard would not be in
business unless it trusted profoundly in the capacities of ordinary people, as elites by definition
disdain them.

It is hardly the case that all of these writers are in agreement with each other.
Antonio Negri argues “not only must Lenin’s thought be re-examined with
energetic fidelity, but it must also be reframed—as it were—‘beyond Lenin.’” Of
course, in going beyond Lenin, Negri and cothinker Michael Hardt presented a
notion of the world, in their stimulating best-seller Empire, that argued for the
obsolescence of Lenin’s classic Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
This is in stark contrast to what Georges Labica argues in Lenin Reloaded
—“contemporary globalization is nothing other than Lenin’s ‘new imperialism,’
now reaching a still higher stage of development.” It is worth pondering how this
yet “higher stage” is described:
If we finally take into account elements unknown to the old “new imperialism,” since they simply
did not exist, or at least in some cases not on such a scale, such as the weight of debt controlled by
international monetary institutions, which has led to the ruin of an entire continent (Africa), we
have such things as the threat of nuclear weapons, the dangers to the environment, the foreseeable
shortage of drinking water, and the general commodification that extends to the sale of organs and
the massive prostitution of children, so that we should not be afraid to speak of a regular
“criminalization of the world economy.” The drug trade, another element previously unknown,
stands at the head of world commerce, narcotics being the commodity with the highest rate of
profit.

Also in these pages are prominent leaders of would-be Leninist parties, such
as Alex Callinicos of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Daniel
Bensaïd of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR)—capable
intellectuals from substantial organizations. Callinicos articulately challenges,
among other things, what one might call traces of Stalinist residue among others
in this volume, yet with a comradely tone and with a respect for the common
ground they share in relation to what has been the sterile anti-Leninist
consensus. He usefully concludes his contribution with a serious-minded
discussion of Lenin’s relevance to today’s Left—having to do with what he sees
as 1) Lenin’s strategic analysis of capitalism, 2) his perspective of the specificity
and centrality of politics, and 3) his view on the necessity of political
organization. This seems remarkably consistent with points made in Bensaïd’s
own distinctive essay, which concludes with the thought that “a politics without
parties (whatever name—movement, organization, league, party—they are
given) ends up in most cases as a politics without politics: either an aimless
tailism toward the spontaneity of social movements, or the worst form of elitist
individualist vanguardism, or finally a repression of the political in favor of the
aesthetic or the ethical.”
As suggested in Negri’s earlier-noted comments, there are those who
emphasize how one can use Lenin to go beyond Lenin. In exploring Lenin’s
radical engagement with Hegel of 1914–16, Kevin Anderson comments that “by
widening the orthodox Marxian notion of the revolutionary subject, he helped
pave the way for later attempts to widen this still further, to embrace not only, as
Lenin had begun to do, national and ethnic liberation movements, but also those
of women, ecologists, gays and lesbians, and youth.” At the same time,
Anderson goes out of his way to stress that one can “still appreciate the many
attractive features of this great revolutionary leader without in any way self-
identifying as a Leninist, which in the dominant discourse usually means an
adherence to his elitist concept of the vanguard party.” We have noted that some
of Anderson’s fellow contributors differ with him here—but none so completely
as another scholar who also avoids “self-identifying as a Leninist,” Lars T. Lih,
who buoyantly argues (against critics like Anderson and against more than one
defender in this volume) that the Lenin of the 1902 classic What Is to Be Done?
—no elitist at all—got his perspectives on organization from none other than
Karl Marx himself, “but more concretely and effectively from Marx as
incarnated by European Social Democracy and the German SPD in particular.”
All of this is interesting, and yet we happen to live in a time when, as the
editors of this collection observe, “global capitalism appears to be the only game
in town and the liberal-democratic system as the optimal political organization of
society, [and] it has indeed become easier to imagine the end of the world than a
far more modest change in the mode of production.” Their response: “For us,
‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the contrary,
the Lenin that we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose
fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new
constellation in which old reference points proved useless, and who was thus
compelled to reinvent Marxism.”
The rich, diverse contributions offered in this book—in some cases jostling
aggressively against each other, while unified around the common perspective
voiced by the editors—is a challenge for all serious intellectuals and activists of
our time.
Lenin Rediscovered
A limitation of Lenin Reloaded is that the essayists do not have an opportunity,
between its covers, to demonstrate amply the virtues embodied in Lenin that are
implied in their provocative, sharp-edged assertions. This cannot be said,
however, about the volume that one of them has recently produced. Lars T. Lih’s
Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context reminds me of a saying
a Swedish comrade once shared with me—“enough to choke a horse.” It is
massive, almost overwhelming—and yet, it is a magnificent contribution to our
understanding of Lenin, Bolshevism, Marxism, and the history of the Russian
revolutionary movement and of Communism.
Clearly written, well reasoned, and effectively documented, it is a work that
no scholar seriously examining the life and thought of Lenin will be able to
ignore. More than this, it is a gift to serious political activists seeking to draw on
traditions and lessons of the past in order to get present-day and future
possibilities into sharper focus. It is unfortunate that this book’s price is
prohibitive for most activists, and that the sheer bulk of the volume (more than
860 pages) will be daunting for many. But those who seek to bridge the gap
between serious scholarship and serious activism by helping deepen their
comrades’ understanding through the development of more widely accessible
educational materials will certainly want to draw on this outstanding resource.
Lih’s primary target for criticism is “a strong consensus of informed experts”
who “at least from the mid-1950s” have put forward a reading of What Is to Be
Done? that “has found its way into textbooks of political science and of Russian
history, and, from there, into almost any secondary account that has reason to
touch on Lenin. The two or three famous passages that form the textual basis of
this reading are endlessly recycled from textbook to popular history to
specialized monograph and back again.” He sums up: “Putting all the assertions
of the textbook interpretation together, we realize that WITBD is a profound
theoretical and organizational innovation, the charter document of Bolshevism,
and the ultimate source of Stalinism”—a set of contentions unable to withstand
this scholarly onslaught.
Lih presents a Lenin who is absolutely committed to the establishment of
political democracy as essential to the struggle for and the realization of
socialism, a Lenin who has immense confidence that the working class has a
natural capacity for absorbing revolutionary socialist ideas and committing itself
to the struggle for a radically better world, a Lenin who is determined to help
build a broad working-class party with a principled socialist program flowing
from a Marxist understanding of the world. He demolishes the notions that Lenin
diverged qualitatively from Marx, that he distrusted the workers and their
“spontaneity,” that he was an elitist and an authoritarian.
There is, however, a problematical feature of Lenin Rediscovered. While his
primary anticommunist target is effectively dealt with, he also has a bone to pick
with how Lenin has been understood by “activists in the Trotskyist tradition”
(specifically “writers such as Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, and more recently Paul
Le Blanc”—here referring to my 1990 book Lenin and the Revolutionary Party).
The activists, he claims, have been inclined to give too much ground to the
academics’ positing an elitist and authoritarian content in Lenin’s 1902 classic.
While he does have some nice things to say about us, he suggests that the
activists are swayed by the unfair and inaccurate anti-Lenin polemics of 1904
advanced by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky (which are also employed by
many of the academics). As I argue in a review that appeared in the journal
Historical Materialism, aspects of this argument strike me as too broadly put and
somewhat off-base. Yet this strikes me as a minor problem within what remains
a splendid achievement.
Lih is able to demonstrate, with scholarly thoroughness, that this vision is at
the core of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and other writings from the mid-1890s
up to the revolutionary upsurge of 1905. Thanks to his knowledge of Russian, he
is able to comb through existing English translations to identify problematical
formulations that do not exist in the Russian original. In fact, about one-third of
the text consists of a retranslation of What Is to Be Done?, with two sections of
detailed annotations—an incredible contribution by itself. He also combs
through an immense quantity of other Russian-language materials that he utilizes
to help bring the context of Lenin’s writings into clearer focus than ever before.
For those of us laboring without Russian language skills, this in itself is a
precious offering.
More than this, noting that Lenin unambiguously projected a Russian version
of the German Social Democratic Party as the kind of organization to bring
about socialism in Russia, Lih focuses sustained attention on the German party
and its powerful influence on the Russian Marxists. In doing this, he gives well-
merited respectful attention to the early contributions of Karl Kautsky and to his
importance for the revolutionary Left, Lenin most of all.
One might argue that he “bends the stick” too far—being rather dismissive of
the powerful critique of “so-called fatalistic Marxism” of the Second
International advanced in the 1920s by the likes of Lukács, Korsch, and
Gramsci, and not being alert to the critical insights that Rosa Luxemburg and
other revolutionary Marxists (Pannekoek, Riazanov, Parvus, Trotsky, Radek,
Rakovsky, and others) were developing at the time. These critical insights found
confirmation in the debacle of 1914, causing Lenin himself to revise his earlier
positive judgments and to recast and sharpen his own Marxism. But a serious
understanding of Lenin and the other Russian Marxists of the early 1900s can be
advanced by setting these matters aside in order to fully comprehend the
understanding they had at the time of the Marxism of the Second International
and of German Social Democracy. And as he does this, Lih helps us to see the
strengths and grandeur of these truly impressive entities.
What, according to Lih, was the Leninist vision of the revolutionary party as
put forward in Lenin’s 1902 classic? His view of Lenin’s orientation could be
summarized this way: The creation of a revolutionary workers’ party, guided by
a serious-minded utilization of socialist theory and scientific analysis, drawing
increasing numbers of working people into a highly conscious struggle against
all forms of oppression—this could not be expected to arise easily or
spontaneously. It had to be created through the most persistent, serious,
consistent efforts of revolutionary socialists. The working class would not
automatically become a force for socialist revolution, but it could develop into
such a force with the assistance of a serious revolutionary workers’ party. Such a
party—making past lessons, the most advanced social theory, and a broad social
vision accessible to increasing numbers of workers—would be a vital component
in the self-education and self-organization of the working class, helping to
develop spontaneous working-class impulses toward democracy and socialism
into a cohesive, well-organized, and powerful social force.
The greatest limitation in this huge study, perhaps, is that it is not three or
four times as huge—that is, it stops in 1904. It needs to be extended two more
decades to help us see how Lenin’s party, and his ideas, continued to evolve in
ways that brought about the workers’ revolution of 1917, and what happened in
the revolution’s aftermath to help transform Lenin’s party into something other
than what he intended. It might be good to add the consideration of an additional
ten years, to examine the further transformation of what had been the
revolutionary party of Lenin into the bureaucratic tyranny of Stalin. Those are
realities that must also be understood if we are to comprehend the “Leninism of
Lenin” in a manner that will be useful for those who wish to change the world
for the better.

American Revolutionary
Those arguing in Lenin Reloaded that we need to consider how to translate Lenin
into our own distinctive realities can do little—again because of space
limitations—to illustrate what such efforts might look like. To get a sense of how
some have tried to do this very thing (with complex and often mixed results, to
be sure), it is worth looking at the history of the early Communist movement that
arose in the wake of Lenin’s revolution in Russia.
 Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American
Revolutionary Left is one of the finest books yet produced on the early
Communist movement in the United States. This is not surprising given the
nature of Palmer’s work to date. He was a young colleague of the incomparable
British labor historian E. P. Thompson, of whom Palmer has written a rich and
insightful biography worthy of its subject. In his writing a fluid and clear literary
style seems always to be matched with a searching and disciplined analytical
mind. His mastery of the secondary literature on US Communism is matched by
his own cutting-edge research, pushing the edge of scholarship significantly
outward.
Cannon is a figure often dismissed by academics, intellectuals, and political
opponents as unworthy of serious consideration. But Palmer cuts through the
dismissive tangle to reveal a remarkable figure. The young Cannon was
intensely active in the Socialist Party led by Eugene V. Debs and the colorful and
rambunctious Wobblies—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—before
becoming a key founder and a central leader of the early Communist Party in the
United States. (Cannon’s role in the later Trotskyist movement will be the focus
of a projected second volume, but what we are offered here stands quite well on
its own.)
The wonderful blend of literary and scholarly skills greatly enhances Palmer’s
achievement. The first two chapters on Cannon’s boyhood—which unearth new
material—are written with considerable charm, giving a sense of a boyhood
reminiscent of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Other early chapters convey a
sense of what the early Socialist Party was like on the local level as Cannon was
coming of age in a socialist household in Rosedale, Kansas. The young activist
soon struck out on his own, attracted with many others of his generation to the
rough-and-tumble revolutionary unionism of the Wobblies, and Palmer gives a
marvelous on-the-ground picture of the IWW during the Progressive era in such
places as New Castle, Pennsylvania, where Cannon edited a Wobbly paper and
helped provide leadership in organizing and strike struggles. Also very well done
is the account of the merging of local radical streams (under the impact of World
War I, government repression, and the Russian Revolution) into the early US
Communist movement.
The historiography of US Communism has been a minefield. The
contributions of Theodore Draper—in two volumes focused on the first ten years
of American Communism—long dominated the field, and this terrain was
extended into the 1930s by Draper protégé Harvey Klehr. Draper and those
identifying with him strongly emphasize the decisive influence of the Soviet
Union in shaping and dominating American Communism, telling a grim story of
authoritarian corruption and wasted idealism. This “traditional” orientation
(compatible with traditional Cold War liberalism and more recent
neoconservatism) has been sharply challenged over the years by a very
substantial and incredibly rich body of “revisionist” scholarship (compatible
with “New Left” and socialist perspectives). The “revisionists” have insisted on
the indigenous roots of US Communism and—while not denying negative
influences emanating from the Soviet Union—highlight inspiring struggles and
positive contributions on American soil.
Palmer stakes out a new position in this highly contentious field. He does not
allow the story of triumphant Stalinism to obliterate the fact that capitalism is an
oppressive system, and that the early Communists were often insightful,
creative, and heroic in confronting it—both drawing from and contributing to the
rich traditions of the US labor and radical movements. In contrast to many of the
“revisionists,” however, the story of American Communism’s subordination to
the vicious Stalin dictatorship that came to dominate the Soviet Union and the
world Communist movement is no less central to Palmer’s account than it was to
Draper’s.
Most historians of American Communism have focused on other periods: the
first moments, when John Reed and others respond with joy and boundless
optimism to the Russian Revolution of 1917; the mass struggles and growing
influence of the 1930s; the shift from significant influence during World War II
to the disasters of the anticommunist Cold War era; the crisis and collapse in the
wake of the revelations of Stalin’s crimes. Here we are offered a coherent and
detailed story about the converging streams of vibrant labor radicalism that
resulted in US Communism’s beginnings, its initial growth in the glow of the
Russian Revolution, and its painful disorientation and corruption as the
revolutionary promise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was replaced by the
bureaucratic tyranny of Stalin’s regime.
One of the great strengths of Palmer’s book is that it so effectively challenges
a common misconception perpetrated by many latter-day students of US
Communism, to some extent beguiled by rationalizations of many who
embraced the Stalinist dilution of Communism prevalent from the mid-1930s
onward. According to such accounts, the US Communist Party of the 1920s was
little more than a hotbed of sterile sectarianism that was only overcome by the
broad-based reformism of the later “people’s front” era. Palmer shows us,
however, that this movement represented, “for all its internal divisions, a leading
edge of the labor Left, as well as an important force in defending civil rights for
oppressed minorities and class-war prisoners”—all in all “a momentous advance
for the revolutionary Left, albeit one that would soon stumble and eventually fall
backward.”
The formation of the US Communist Party had been the culmination of half a
century of experience since the Civil War, involving the cumulative development
of a vibrant labor-radical subculture, and the corresponding evolution of three
generations of labor-radical activists. Uneven, full of contradictions and
sometimes absurdities, the Communist Party of the 1920s, with a membership
fluctuating between seven thousand and twelve thousand, exercised significant
influence in labor, radical, and even liberal circles. Under William Z. Foster’s
leadership, and with the assistance of Cannon and others, an influential network
was created in the American Federation of Labor through the Trade Union
Educational League (TUEL), to which many progressive union leaders and
activists rallied. (Palmer’s critical assessment of Foster’s missteps and
limitations provides worthwhile insights into TUEL failures.)
The party was also involved in defending human rights and civil liberties in
the United States, particularly those of workers, through the International Labor
Defense (ILD), which was conceived of during 1925 discussions between
Cannon, his companion Rose Karsner, and the legendary IWW leader “Big Bill”
Haywood. Indeed, Palmer’s book offers the first sustained examination of the
ILD (which has generally been subjected to scholarly scrutiny primarily only
around the Herndon and Scottsboro cases later in the 1930s). There were many
other components of the Communist movement—focusing on the rights of
oppressed racial and national groups, women’s rights, immigrant rights, the
interests of young people and aspirations of students, the opposition to war and
imperialism and militarism. Significant attention was given to educating around
and building support for the Soviet Union, where many felt a bright socialist
future was being built. There were a variety of publications, educational efforts,
cultural activities, and more.
He described Cannon as “a figure stamped with the unmistakable marks of
the native-born proletarian agitator, [who] nevertheless cultivated relations with
some of the more cosmopolitan and theoretical elements in the communist
movement, such as Alexander Bittleman, just as he rubbed shoulders with the
cultural wing of the revolutionary Left, reviewing books by Mike Gold, drinking
and breaking bread with the likes of Tom Tippett and Joseph Freeman, and
impressing a youthfully radical Claude McKay with his acumen at a Comintern
gathering in Moscow.”
Although rich in material on the internal workings of the Communist Party, as
well as on the interesting details of Cannon’s life, this big book goes much
further. Connections with larger economic, social, and cultural developments in
the United States are frequently made, with contextual explications, as well, of
both national and international political realities. A discussion of the interplay
between shifting dynamics within the Communist International and factional
fluctuations among the early US Communists is central to the latter part of the
narrative (and is a key to Palmer’s own interpretation) without, however,
obliterating the larger narrative. One gets a vibrant sense of problems and
struggles among workers, with the importance of the Passaic strike and the
Sacco and Vanzetti case, for example, shining through—and helping to
illuminate—the internal conflicts that wracked the Communist Party in the same
period.
Palmer does not hold back from tackling larger issues of US labor radicalism,
including such questions as Why is there no socialism in the United States? and
—at least by implication—how obstacles to an effective socialist movement
might be transcended. He explores the relationship of the Soviet Union, as
opposed to indigenous traditions, to US Communism, while tracing
contributions of the Communist movement to social struggles and social changes
in the larger society. He also gives attention to the “organization question” and
how different ways of dealing with it have had a significant impact on the
fortunes and effectiveness of a political organization and movement. In this last
matter, he is part of the rising current of sharp-thinking left-wing scholars who
are moving well beyond the fashionable bashing of “the Leninist vanguard
party” as the root of all evil. The example and influence of Lenin and the
Bolsheviks are far more positive than negative in this narrative. Cannon’s
stubborn adherence to the early revolutionary ideals is what gets him into trouble
with the bureaucratic-authoritarian degeneration of international Communism
with the advance and consolidation of the Stalin regime.
The book concludes with the decision of Cannon and a few handfuls of
comrades to adhere to the Left Opposition headed by Trotsky. Their expulsion
from the Communist mainstream (with even former adherents such as William
Dunne and Gil Green turning against them) was engineered by leaders of a rival
faction, Jay Lovestone, Bertram D. Wolfe, and Ben Gitlow, who soon were
expelled themselves for being insufficiently Stalinist, and who a couple of
decades later were prominent Cold War anticommunists. The distinguishing
characteristic of Cannon and many others who rallied around Trotsky’s banner
was that they would remain true to the revolutionary and working-class socialist
ideals that had animated the early Communists, in the face of incredibly more
powerful and ugly yet “relevant” forces—the totalitarian lure of Stalinism and
the exploitative materialism of capitalism.

Lenin Lives
If the words “LENIN LIVES!” are to be more than rhetorical posturing, they will
have to go beyond the intellectual constructions contained in essays of the
eighteen intellectuals represented in Lenin Reloaded. Some of that volume’s
essayists insist on this themselves. “Without revolutionary theory there is no
revolutionary movement, to be sure, which at one level means no more than that
you can’t have a women’s movement without the idea of feminism,” Eagleton
tells us. “But at the same time, according to Lenin, there is no adequate theory
without revolutionary practice. Correct revolutionary theory, he insisted,
assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a mass
revolutionary movement.”
Living “Leninism” is not encompassed in one and a half dozen intellectuals
(the number associated with this book)—they are not “the revolutionary
vanguard” of which Lenin spoke, nor is an organization of eighteen hundred
activists that has simply declared itself to be so. The words “mass movement”
suggests that the vanguard Lenin has in mind constitutes a more substantial,
measurable percentage of the working class. My uncle’s old handbill, an artifact
from the time of which Palmer writes, reflects the fact that serious efforts to
implement Lenin’s perspective were rooted in a political, social, cultural
phenomenon adding up to a section (or vanguard) of the working class. This
seems so alien to our own reality!
Yet long before radical academics were intoning the mantra of “race, class,
and gender” and to exploring even more diverse and dynamically intersecting
identities, such sensibilities could be seen (despite inadequate vocabularies and
the inevitable clumsiness of beginners) within the Leninist tradition. The
Workers Party of America sought to represent women as well as men, young and
old and everyone in between, workers of all colors and cultures and ethnicities,
each and every person who suffered oppression under capitalism. It sought to
draw more and more of the working class into an independent economic, social,
and political force capable of effectively challenging the multifaceted power of
capitalism. Its goal was to transfer that power into the hands of the working-class
majority—to allow the free development of each to become the basis for the free
development of all.
“For Lenin, the knowledge that the working class can have of itself is
indissolubly linked to a precise knowledge of the reciprocal relations of all
classes in contemporary society, a knowledge which is not only theoretical, we
should say is less theoretical than founded on the experience of politics.” This
according to Bensaïd, who adds: “It is through the test of practical politics that
this knowledge of the reciprocal relations between classes is acquired. To
paraphrase Lenin, this makes ‘our revolution’ into a ‘revolution of the whole
people.’” Callinicos—challenging the notion prevalent among many activists
that “the dispersal of campaigning energies serves to confuse the corporate
establishment and keep it on the defensive,” which he warns could lead to
“confusion and exhaustion among activists”—adds that “any effective radical
movement requires some means of fitting together specific grievances into some
more comprehensive picture of what is wrong and how to remedy it and some
systematic means of translating this vision into reality.”
As smart as these leftist intellectuals are, they are not the only ones to whom
such ideas are occurring. Our world is in trouble. “Mainstream” politics and the
logic of the market seem unable to keep things from getting worse. Varieties of
reformism, anarchism, and fundamentalism (secular as well as religious) have
been tried, continue to be tried, and yet the times in which we live seem to grow
more terrible. There is a growing unease, questioning, searching for new
pathways of thought and action. These books, which ten or fifteen years ago
might not have been taken seriously, will today still not be read by masses of
people. But what masses of people are experiencing and feeling and thinking
today gives these books a greater resonance than before, and so they may find a
greater “market”—a broader and more intense readership—than before. It is
even possible that these intellectual stirrings will contribute to thinking and
activity among an emergent layer of activists that, in turn, could facilitate larger
political shifts.
Lenin has returned, possibly to be followed by a reemergence/revitalization of
some variant (or variants) of Leninist politics. Whether this will advance
struggles for human liberation, with activists learning from (not repeating)
sectarian and tragic derailments of the past—this is a question that may yet
become relevant.
Chapter Two
ONE FOR THE ENCYCLOPEDIAS

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on April 22, 1870 (April 10, according to the
Old Style calendar then used in Russia), in Simbursk (later renamed Ulyanovsk),
a provincial town on the Volga River. He was the third of six children in what
was at first a relatively happy family. His father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, was
a respected director of public schools. His mother, Maria Alexandrovna Blank,
was the daughter of a physician and taught her children a love of reading and
music. His father died in 1886, and in 1887 his beloved older brother, Alexander,
was arrested and hanged for involvement in an unsuccessful plot by
revolutionary university students to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.
At the end of 1887, Lenin himself was briefly arrested for involvement in a
peaceful demonstration against the oppressive tsarist regime and for membership
in a radical political group. A brilliant student, he had just entered the University
of Kazan, but his involvement in protest activities resulted in his immediate
expulsion and banishment to a small village near Kazan, where he lived under
police surveillance. In 1888 he was permitted to return to Kazan, but he was
denied entry to any university and therefore embarked on his own rigorous
course of study. In 1891 he passed law examinations at the University of St.
Petersburg. Lenin worked as a lawyer for only a few months before becoming a
full-time revolutionary.

The Making of a Revolutionary

At the time when Lenin became a revolutionary, impoverished peasants made up
about 90 percent of Russia’s population. An expanding class of wage workers
and their families, created through the country’s substantial industrial growth in
the late nineteenth century, made up another 7 percent. There was also a small
“middle-class” layer of professionals and well-to-do businessmen (the
bourgeoisie), and at the very top, a powerful landed aristocracy capped by an
absolute monarchy. The country was characterized by a complete absence of
democracy, limits on freedom of expression, the persecution of all religious
minorities outside the official Russian Orthodox Church, severe limitations on
the rights of women, and oppression of more than one hundred national
minorities that inhabited the Russian Empire—a notorious “prison-house of
nations” (in which a variety of national groups were oppressed by their Russian
conquerors). Such conditions generated many revolutionary currents.
Lenin was deeply influenced by earlier nineteenth-century Russian
revolutionaries, especially the writer Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, as well as by
the underground revolutionary populist movement known as the People’s Will
(Narodnaya Volya). This current was made up of idealistic activists who
specialized in clandestine methods and sought to organize a peasant-based
revolution and to establish a socialist society that would be based largely on the
traditional commune, sometimes known as the “mir,” that had existed in peasant
villages throughout Russia. Lenin drew upon this tradition, especially in his
underground organizational concepts, but he was most profoundly attracted to
the Western European working-class orientation developed by Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels in such works as The Communist Manifesto, Capital, and
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. This orientation had been most forcefully
injected into the Russian revolutionary movement by Georgi Plekhanov. Lenin
became an influential voice among Russian Marxists through his study The
Development of Capitalism in Russia (1897) and many other works.
The Marxists argued that Russia was undergoing a capitalist transformation,
that industrialization was creating a factory-based proletariat, and that this
working class would become the most effective force in the struggle to
overthrow tsarism. Instead of engaging in terrorist activities (assassinations, and
so forth) against the tsar and his officials, as the People’s Will had done, the
Marxists argued that the working class should build trade unions to fight for
better working conditions and living standards, should organize mass
demonstrations to pressure for broader democratic and social reforms, and
should organize their own political party to lead the struggle for a democratic
revolution. Such a revolution would clear the way for the economic and political
development of Russia (presumably through a capitalist economy and
democratic republic). Then, when the working class became the majority, the
process would culminate in a second revolution with a socialist character. The
workers would take control of the economy and run it for the benefit of all. The
Marxists believed that workers in other countries should and would be moving in
a similar direction.

The Rise of Bolshevism

In 1898, the Marxists organized the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(RSDLP) to advance their orientation. Later, in 1901–02, the Populists organized
the competing Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. Both parties joined the
international federation known as the Socialist (or Second) International. Lenin
aimed many polemics against the SR, but soon he also developed serious
disagreements with others in the RSDLP. In the pages of the newspaper Iskra
(“The Spark”), Lenin, Plekhanov, Julius Martov, and others criticized the so-
called Economists, who urged that workers should concentrate only on economic
issues at the workplace and that leadership of the democratic struggle should be
left in the hands of pro-capitalist liberals. Lenin and the other “Iskraists” argued
in favor of building a strong centralized party that would draw the various layers
of the working class into a broad economic and political struggle to oppose all
forms of oppression, overthrow tsarism, and advance the workers’ interests.
Lenin popularized these ideas in What Is to Be Done?, published in 1902. The
“Iskraists” won the day at the second congress of the RSDLP, held in Brussels
and London in 1903. But before the congress was over they themselves had split
into two organized factions—the Bolsheviks (from the Russian bolshe, meaning
“more,” since they had gained a plurality of votes) and the Mensheviks (from the
Russian word menshe, meaning “less”). This split was analyzed in Lenin’s One
Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904). The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, insisted on
a more disciplined party than favored by the Mensheviks, who became
associated with Martov and Plekhanov. In addition, the Mensheviks favored a
coalition between workers and capitalists to overthrow tsarism, whereas Lenin
(for example, in his 1905 polemic Two Tactics of the Social Democracy in the
Democratic Revolution) insisted that a worker-peasant alliance, and the
subsequent creation of a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the
peasantry,” would be necessary to achieve a genuinely democratic revolution in
Russia.
In this period Lenin maintained a precarious existence in the revolutionary
underground (where he met and married one of his closest comrades, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, in 1898), in prison and Siberian exile, and in frugal circumstances as
an exile outside Russia. He lived in Munich from 1900 to 1902, in London from
1902 to 1903, and in Geneva from 1903 to 1905. Lenin and Krupskaya played an
essential role in coordinating the work of the underground Bolshevik
organization of the RSDLP, also facilitating the production and distribution of
such revolutionary newspapers as Vperyod (“Forward”) and Proletarii (“The
Proletarian”).

From the 1905 Revolution to 1914

In 1905 a revolutionary upsurge sparked by a spontaneous uprising among the
workers, after the tsar’s troops fired on a peaceful demonstration in St.
Petersburg, and fueled by hundreds of strikes and peasant insurgencies, forced
the tsarist regime to grant a number of important reforms, including greater
political liberties and the creation of a weak parliamentary body called the
Duma.
 Although Lenin at first rejected participation in the Duma (he changed his
position in 1906), he supported participation in the soviets (councils) of workers’
deputies, spontaneously formed democratic bodies arising in workplaces and
workers’ communities that directed revolutionary activities. He also strongly
favored opening up the RSDLP, especially its Bolshevik wing, to a dramatic
influx of radicalizing workers. The political gap between Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks narrowed, and the membership of the RSDLP soared. One left-wing
Menshevik, Leon Trotsky, head of the St. Petersburg soviet, even advanced (in
articles written from 1904 through 1906) the idea of permanent revolution—that
is, the concept that the democratic revolution would lead to workers taking
political power with support from the peasants, initiating a transitional period to
socialism, with the Russian Revolution helping to generate workers’ revolutions
in more advanced industrial countries. While Lenin did not fully accept this
notion at the time, it was later reflected in his perspectives for the 1917
revolution.
In late 1905 and throughout 1906, however, the forces of tsarist conservatism
were able to stem the revolutionary tide and rescind many of the reforms granted
earlier. Revolutionaries were once again forced underground or into exile, and
many left-wing intellectuals became demoralized.
Differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks once again
sharpened, yet Lenin also found himself in conflict with a group of Bolsheviks
led by Alexander A. Bogdanov. These “ultraleft” Bolsheviks denigrated trade
union work and other reform activities (to which they counterposed “armed
struggle”), and also questioned the wisdom of the Bolsheviks’ running in
elections and participating in the Duma. Lenin insisted that involvement in the
Duma gave revolutionary socialists a powerful tool for legal agitation and
education and that reform struggles enabled the working-class movement to
grow in experience and political effectiveness. He wrote a philosophical work,
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), arguing against what he saw as
serious philosophical revisions of Marxism being advanced by Bogdanov and
others. At the same time, he was conducting a fierce struggle against the
“Liquidators,” an influential current among the Mensheviks that wanted to
replace all revolutionary underground organizational forms with strictly legal
and reform-minded structures. Lenin was also sharply critical of “conciliators,”
such as Trotsky and even of some in the Bolsheviks’ ranks, who attempted to
maintain RSDLP unity. He had concluded that a cohesive and disciplined
organization, based on a revolutionary Marxist program combining both legal
and underground activity, could not be created by seeking compromises with
socialists having a variety of orientations.
In 1912 Lenin and those who agreed with him sought to reorganize the
RSDLP on a clear, cohesive basis—which resulted in a split with all other
currents in the RSDLP. The new Bolshevik RSDLP published the newspaper
Pravda (“Truth”). They had not only a coherent strategic orientation but, above
all, a clear program, highlighted by three demands: an eight-hour work day,
beneficial to the workers; land reform, beneficial to the peasants; and a
democratic constituent assembly. These three demands were used to dramatize
the need for a worker-peasant alliance in the democratic revolution. The
Bolsheviks also had a serious and disciplined organizational structure that
integrated legal reform efforts with revolutionary work. Between 1912 and 1914
Lenin’s Bolsheviks outstripped all other currents in the Russian revolutionary
movement, enjoying predominance among the organized workers.
Bolshevik successes coincided with a new wave of radicalization among the
dramatically growing Russian working class. Government violence against
striking workers in the Lena gold fields in 1912, combined with population
growth in the country’s industrial centers marked by intensive exploitation of
workers, generated considerable ferment and growing protests. By 1914 some
observers concluded that Russia was on the verge of another revolutionary
outbreak.
Imperialist World War
This militant upswing was checked, however, by the eruption of World War I,
which was used by the tsarist authorities to suppress all dissent. The socialist
movement split into “patriotic” and antiwar fragments, not only in Russia but in
all countries involved in the conflict. In Russia only the more moderate
“patriotic” socialists were able to operate openly, thus managing to eclipse the
now repressed Bolsheviks in the labor movement.
Lenin had moved to Krakow, in Austrian Poland, in 1912. After the outbreak
of war in 1914 he was deported to Switzerland. Lenin, like many Marxists, had
expected the outbreak of war. However, he was deeply shocked by the
capitulation of the Second International’s mass parties before the “patriotic”
demands of their respective ruling classes—in particular that of the German
Socialist Party (SPD), which he had previously considered the very model of an
orthodox Marxist party in a more or less democratic parliamentary system. With
the exception of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and a few others, the bulk
of the SPD leaders either endorsed German war aims or refrained from opposing
the war effort. Lenin, along with Luxemburg and others on the revolutionary left,
saw imperialism—the aggressive economic expansionism of the various “great
powers”—as the underlying cause of the ensuing slaughter. He was outraged that
workers of the rival countries were being encouraged to kill each other in this
conflict, and he never forgave Karl Kautsky, the German symbol of “orthodox
Marxism,” for rationalizing the betrayal of working-class internationalism.
In the period from 1914 to 1917 Lenin concentrated on efforts to build a
revolutionary socialist opposition to the war. He joined with various antiwar
socialist currents at the Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences in criticizing the
failure of the Second International to remain true to its uncompromisingly
antiwar statements, and he called for a new, revolutionary Third International.
He also produced a study that explored the economic roots of World War I,
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). In addition, he developed a
critical analysis of nationalism, distinguishing between the nationalism of
advanced and oppressive capitalist “great powers” (which revolutionaries should
not support) and the nationalism of peoples oppressed and exploited by the
“great powers” (which revolutionaries should support).
Lenin at this time also took issue with those non-Bolshevik revolutionaries,
notably Luxemburg and Trotsky, whose policies were, in fact, closest to his own.
Rejecting the emphasis of Luxemburg (in The Junius Pamphlet) and Trotsky (in
War and the International) on calling for immediate peace and advocating a
“Socialist United States of Europe,” he advanced the most intransigent possible
slogan: “Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War.” Though only his closest
associates, such as Gregory Zinoviev, accepted this slogan, it was very important
to Lenin because it would make impossible any compromise with “centrist”
Social Democrats such as Kautsky and (in France) Jean Longuet, who by 1916
inclined toward a moderately antiwar posture yet were quite unwilling to make a
clear break with the pro-war majorities of their parties. Only by splitting
revolutionary socialists away from such compromisers would it be possible, he
believed, to provide leadership to war-weary masses for a genuine socialist
transformation.

The Fall of Tsarism and the Rise of “Dual Power”

Within Russia, a growing disillusionment with the war generated a new upsurge
of radicalism among the workers and peasants. A spontaneous uprising initiated
by women workers on International Women’s Day in Petrograd (as St.
Petersburg had been renamed in 1914) in March 1917 turned into a successful
revolution when the Russian Army—largely “peasants in uniform”—joined with
the insurgent workers and turned against the tsarist government. A situation of
“dual power” arose as the powers of the state were assumed by democratically
elected councils (soviets) of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies and also by a pro-
capitalist Provisional Government set up by politicians in the Duma. Many SRs
and Mensheviks, and even some Bolsheviks, supported the Provisional
Government. Lenin returned from exile in April 1917 to challenge this
widespread orientation.
Immediately after the overthrow of the tsarist regime, Lenin had desperately
sought to find ways to return to Russia. He was refused permission to travel by
way of Great Britain and France, since the governments of those countries saw
him as a threat to Russia’s continued participation in the war. However, the
German government—for similar reasons—allowed Lenin and all other Russian
exiles to travel through Germany. Later, those hostile to Lenin were to use this
(and also funds from Germany allegedly secured by the Bolsheviks) in order to
slander him as a “German agent.”
Upon his arrival in Petrograd, Lenin pointed out that the Provisional
Government was unable to end Russian involvement in the war, could not
guarantee that the workers in the cities would have enough to eat, and was
unprepared to break up the nobility’s large estates to give land to the peasants.
Therefore, he argued, workers and revolutionaries should give no support to the
Provisional Government. Instead they should demand “all power to the soviets”
and insist on “peace, bread, and land.” The democratic revolution had to grow
into a working-class revolution supported by the peasantry. This development
would stimulate the war-weary and radicalizing workers of such countries as
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France to join their Russian comrades in
socialist revolution.
These “April Theses” shocked most of Russia’s socialists, including many
leading Bolsheviks, but quickly won over the rank and file of Lenin’s party, as
well as such former opponents as Trotsky. By July 1917 the Bolsheviks were in
the lead of a militant mass demonstration against the Provisional Government,
which was now headed by Alexander Kerensky, a moderate socialist. The
demonstration erupted in violence, leading to repression by the Provisional
Government. Many Bolsheviks (including the prestigious new recruit Trotsky)
were arrested, and Lenin fled across the border to Finland. There he began
writing his classic Marxist study The State and Revolution, which presented a
libertarian and democratic vision of working-class revolution and the socialist
future. Before he could complete this study, events had evolved to the point
where Lenin found it possible to issue a practical appeal to the Bolshevik Central
Committee for a revolutionary seizure of power.
Counterrevolutionary opponents played a key role in bringing about this turn
in events. In September 1917 General Lavr Kornilov mounted a right-wing
military coup designed to oust both the Provisional Government and the soviets.
The Provisional Government freed all revolutionary militants from prison and
gave them arms. Bolsheviks joined with Mensheviks, SRs, anarchists, and others
to defend the revolution. Kornilov was defeated, his troops melting away under
the influence of revolutionary agitators.

Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War

From hiding, Lenin urgently insisted to his comrades that the Bolsheviks launch
an uprising to establish soviet power. Two of his own close followers, Gregory
Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, argued against so audacious a move, but they found
themselves overwhelmed by revolutionary enthusiasm not only within the party
but among growing sectors of the working class and peasantry. A split among the
SRs resulted in a substantial left-wing faction that supported the Bolshevik
demands. The soviets themselves now adopted the position of “all power to the
soviets” and organized a Military Revolutionary Committee under Trotsky’s
direction, which prepared an insurrection to overthrow the Provisional
Government.
The stirring but relatively bloodless October Revolution in Russia, which was
actually carried out on November 7, 1917 (according to the modern calendar),
was seen as a beacon of hope by the discontented throughout the world. One of
the central developments of the twentieth century, it led to the formation of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to the rise of modern Communism.
 Lenin was the leader of the first Soviet government, the Council of People’s
Commissars (Sovnarkom), which consisted of a coalition of Bolsheviks (who
soon renamed their organization the Communist Party) and Left Socialist
Revolutionaries (commonly referred to as Left SRs). The new regime entered
into peace negotiations with Germany to secure Russia’s withdrawal from World
War I. The German government made harsh demands for territorial and financial
concessions as a precondition for a peace settlement. Many revolutionaries,
including the Left SRs and even a Left Communist faction in Lenin’s own party,
opposed the concessions and called for a revolutionary war against German
imperialism.
Trotsky, who as leader of the Russian negotiating team at Brest-Litovsk had
used the peace talks to expose German imperialist war aims and to appeal to the
German masses “over the heads” of their government, took an intermediary
position, hoping that German military action against the infant Soviet republic
would be blocked by mutinies and strikes by the German working class. Trotsky
advocated refusal either to sign the Germans’ Brest-Litovsk diktat or to resume
the war with a virtually nonexistent Russian Army. This compromise position
was initially adopted by the Soviet government, but the hoped-for mass strikes
and mutinies failed to materialize, and, when the German military launched a
devastating offensive, Trotsky withdrew his “neither war nor peace” proposal
and sided with Lenin.
Against angry opposition among many Bolsheviks and most Left SRs, Lenin
insisted on Russia’s need for peace and narrowly won acceptance of what were
now even stiffer German demands, resulting in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
(March 3, 1918). The Left SRs withdrew from the government and assumed a
stance of violent opposition. The Right SRs and even some Mensheviks were
openly hostile as well. Pro-capitalist and pro-tsarist forces committed themselves
to the overthrow of the new regime, as did a number of foreign governments,
notably those of Great Britain, France, the United States, and Japan. In all,
fourteen foreign countries intervened with military forces and aided
counterrevolutionary Russian forces in an escalating, brutal civil war. Masses of
workers and peasants joined the new Red Army to defend the gains of the
revolution. Their efforts were hampered by economic collapse—hastened by
premature nationalizations—and also by the inexperience and inevitable
mistakes of the new government.
In 1918 some SRs carried out assassination attempts in which Lenin was
badly wounded and other prominent Bolsheviks were killed. In response, a Red
Terror of arrests and executions was launched against all perceived “enemies of
the revolution” by the Cheka (special security forces), set up on Lenin’s
initiative and directed by Felix Dzherzhinsky. Early in 1918 the Sovnarkom had
dissolved what it felt to be an unrepresentative constituent assembly on the
grounds that this institution had been superseded by a more thoroughgoing
soviet democracy. By 1919, however, this democracy had largely evaporated. As
a result of Communist repression of opposing left-wing parties and the relative
disintegration of the working class as a political force (because the economy
itself had largely disintegrated), the soviets were transformed into hollow shells
that would rubber-stamp the decisions of the Sovnarkom and the Communist
Party.
Brutal Communist policies were deepened in response to the murderous
campaigns of anticommunist counterrevolutionaries (often known as “the
Whites” as opposed to the left-wing “Reds”). Increasingly under the leadership
of reactionary and pro-tsarist army officers, the Whites often combined
anticommunism with antidemocratic, anti–working class, anti-peasant, and anti-
Semitic violence. Nonetheless, the Whites were given substantial material
support from foreign governments hoping to put an end to what was a “bad
example” to their own working classes.
Lenin and the Russian Communists were convinced that the spread of
socialist revolution to other countries was essential for the final victory of their
own revolution. In 1919 they organized the first congress of the Communist
International (the Third International), initiating the formation of Communist
parties in countries throughout the world. Concerned that these new parties
might fall prey to “ultraleft” errors (such as attempting to seize power without
majority working-class support or refusing to fight for “mere” reforms), Lenin
wrote “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1920. At the second
and third congresses of the Communist International he argued in favor of the
“united front” tactic, whereby Communists would join forces with more
moderate Socialists to protect and advance workers’ rights against capitalist and
reactionary attacks. (This would also win support among growing numbers of
workers for the Communists who would prove to be the most effective fighters
for the workers’ interests.) Lenin never gave up on the belief that the future of
the new Soviet republic could be secured only through the spread of working-
class revolution to other countries, but he never lived to see his hopes realized.

From “War Communism” to New Economic Policy

During the Russian Civil War, in Lenin’s opinion, he and his comrades had made
terrible mistakes. In pushing back the foreign invaders, for example, the Red
Army—with Lenin’s support but over the objections of Red Army commander
Trotsky—invaded Poland in hopes of generating a revolutionary uprising among
the Polish workers and peasants. Instead, a fierce counterattack drove the
Russian forces from Polish soil.
Some of the greatest mistakes involved the implementation of what was
called “War Communism.” Sweeping nationalizations of industry formally
placed the economy in the hands of the inexperienced state, and attempts at strict
centralized planning introduced authoritarian and bureaucratic elements into the
economy. Efforts were also made to pit “poor peasants” against allegedly “rich
peasants” in order to establish state controls over agriculture. Such policies
resulted in red tape, bottlenecks, and shortages, growing discontent among the
workers and bitterness among the peasants.
These policies were even theorized by some as providing a positive
“shortcut” to the ideal Communist society of the future (which Marx had insisted
could be achieved only after an extended period of high economic productivity,
abundance, and genuinely democratic social control of the means of production).
In fact, the policies of War Communism could reasonably be justified only as
desperate emergency measures in the face of civil war and invasion. By 1921 the
experience of War Communism had generated peasant revolts and an uprising of
workers and sailors at the previously pro-Bolshevik Kronstadt naval base outside
of Petrograd.
Lenin now led the way in adopting more realistic policies that had been urged
by some Communists, including Trotsky. In 1921 the New Economic Policy
(NEP) was established to allow small-scale capitalist production in the
countryside and the reintroduction of market mechanisms into the economy as a
whole. One Bolshevik theorist, Nikolai Bukharin, became closely identified in
later years with the preservation of the NEP reforms. Such changes, together
with the end of the civil war and foreign intervention, led to improvements in the
economy and to the possibility of implementing important health, education, and
social welfare policies beneficial to millions of people in the battered Soviet
republic.
Yet at the same time, the Communist Party under Lenin also took measures to
strengthen its monopoly of political power and even, as an emergency measure,
to curtail democracy within the party itself, for the first time banning factions. In
particular, a Workers Opposition headed by union leader Alexander Shlyapnikov
and feminist intellectual Alexandra Kollontai—calling for greater working-class
control over the state apparatus and economy—was prevented from expressing
its views, but smaller oppositional currents were repressed as well. These
measures established precedents and the framework for the development of a
permanently narrow and repressive dictatorship.

Lenin’s Final Defeat and Legacy

Lenin grew increasingly alarmed that the Soviet republic was becoming
“bureaucratically degenerated,” as he put it. Suffering from a stroke in May
1922, he recovered sufficiently in autumn to return to work, only to be felled by
a second stroke in December. Throughout this period and into the early months
of 1923 he focused attention on ways of overcoming the bureaucratic tyranny
that was gripping the Communist Party and the Soviet government and of
strengthening controls by workers and peasants over the state apparatus.
Lenin opposed the inclination of some party leaders to adopt repressive
policies toward non-Russian nationalities. Chief among these particular leaders
was Joseph Stalin, who became the party’s general secretary in 1922. Also,
while Lenin had seen the concept of “democratic centralism” as involving
“freedom of discussion, unity in action,” Stalin and others who were now in
charge of the party apparatus distorted the concept—so that a bureaucratic
“centralism” crowded out inner-party democracy—to inhibit questioning of and
suppress opposition to their own policies.
Lenin sought an alliance with Trotsky to fight for his positions in the party,
and he broke decisively with Stalin, whom he identified as being in the forefront
of the trends he was opposing. In his last testament he urged that Stalin be
removed from his positions of party leadership. But a third stroke in March 1923
completely incapacitated him. At his country home in the village of Gorki,
outside Moscow, he suffered a last, fatal stroke on January 21, 1924. After an
elaborate state funeral, Lenin’s embalmed body was placed in a mausoleum in
Moscow’s Red Square.
He was mourned by millions in the Soviet Union and by Communists and
other revolutionaries throughout the world, but much of Lenin’s work was
undone by (yet bombastically identified with) the later policies of the Stalin
regime. Even in his lifetime, what he viewed as the “dictatorship of the
proletariat”—political rule by the working class—had, under difficult conditions,
degenerated into a one-party dictatorship. But after his death it evolved into a
ruthless bureaucratic tyranny that defended above all else the material and other
privileges of the bureaucratic rulers.
Those who had been closest to Lenin found their authority eliminated by
Stalin’s political machine, and most of them were eventually killed in the purges
during the 1930s, when many hundreds of thousands of real and imagined
dissidents among the Communists and others were destroyed. Alternatives to
this Stalinist version of “Leninism” were put forward, particularly by Trotsky
and by Bukharin; but throughout the Communist International and the world
Communist movement Stalin’s orientation dominated. Even when later
Communist leaders denounced Stalin in 1956, the bureaucratic system and
undemocratic methods with which he was associated remained in place.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, questions arose about how
much influence Lenin would continue to have as a symbol and as a theorist.
Lenin concerned himself with many dimensions of political theory, but his
distinctive contribution involved the conceptualization and organization of a
party that proved capable of carrying out a socialist revolution in Russia in 1917.
Even for many of his most severe critics, Lenin’s political integrity and personal
selflessness are beyond dispute, as is his place in history as one of the greatest
revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century. What is hotly contested across the
political spectrum, however, is his relevance for the future—which is, of course,
related to how we are to interpret his life and thought and actions.
Chapter Three
TRAVESTIES, STATUES, AND LAUGHTER

Politics (revolutionary politics included) is the art of the possible, and since
politics involves the actions and relationships of human beings, political
possibilities are often reflected in the interplay of personality and politics. To the
extent this is true, it is meaningful to consider personalities of leading political
figures in order to gain insights into their political perspectives and practice.
This is certainly the case with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Russian revolutionary
intellectual who led the Russian Revolution of 1917 that has been seen by many
as the starting point of modern Communism.
These comments are stimulated by a marvelous intellectual romp by Tom
Stoppard entitled Travesties. In that play Lenin is one of three major
revolutionaries—the only political one (and political to his very core), the other
two, novelist James Joyce and Dadaist pioneer Tristan Tzara, being artistic
radicals. As one would expect, the play is permeated with crackling dialogue and
delicious humor, as when the rather silly conservative hero, charmed by Lenin’s
aversion to modern art, tells us “there was nothing wrong with Lenin except his
politics.”1
An exuberant and brilliantly executed revival of the play at Princeton’s
McCarter Theatre in 2012 (more than three decades after it was first produced)
has particular resonance in our own time, a point made by more than one
participant in a stimulating panel discussion after one of its final performances.
Stoppard is one of the most interesting contemporary playwrights, particularly
since, with absolutely no pretense of being a revolutionary, he is drawn—over
and over and over again—to both literate and entertaining engagements with
questions of politics and revolution: not only Travesties but also the remarkable
trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which focuses on Russia’s nineteenth-century
revolutionary intellectuals, and Rock ’n’ Roll (dealing with Communism,
dissidence, and “the velvet revolution” in his native Czechoslovakia).2
Stoppard clearly has no desire to rally theatergoers around the banner of
“Leninism.” Yet it is one of the functions of his plays, just as clearly, to generate
thought and discussion of the ideas that collide and confront each other in what
he presents to theatergoers. Through him many more people than would
otherwise have been the case consider some of Lenin’s ideas.
It is quite striking, however, that of the three revolutionaries in Travesties
(and of all the other characters in what is such a vibrantly funny piece of
theater), only Lenin is given exclusively humorless lines. Of course, just as
Shakespeare’s historical plays present historical figures not as they were but as a
means for telling his own story, so Stoppard’s Lenin is presented not as he
actually was, but as a symbol first of social-political insurgency, and then—more
imposingly—as a symbol of the bureaucratic authoritarianism that Communism
became. Just as Shakespeare’s plays are not diminished as works of art by his
artistic license, so Travesties retains its great charm despite limitations in its
portrayal of the historical Lenin. The fact remains that the actual personality of
Lenin is flattened in this play. That is, arguably, no fault of Stoppard’s. It is the
way Lenin has commonly been seen not only by hostile journalists and historians
but also, for many decades before 1990, by loyal citizens in Communist
countries where immense statues of Lenin were erected to justify and glorify
bureaucratic tyrannies.
Yet the inadequacy of this, for those wishing to understand the actual Lenin,
is suggested when we compare the ponderous talking statue in Travesties with
other portrayals closer to the historical Lenin. Consider Edmund Wilson’s
description (in his 1940 classic To the Finland Station) of how Lenin appears “in
an old historical film patched together from old newsreels, From Tsar to Lenin, a
short sturdy man with a big bald boxlike brow, leaning forward as if on the edge
of his chair, arguing, insisting, smiling, screwing up his eyes in the shrewd
Russian way, gesturing to drive his points home: a rapid fire of lips, eyes and
hands in which the whole man is concentrated.”3 Such animation seems absent
from the Lenin of Travesties.
With the play’s debut in1974, Stoppard’s “Leninism” symbolized a powerful
challenge to artistic freedom. Since Communism’s collapse in the 1990s, the
power of this “Leninism” has seemingly passed away. Yet in a sense, Lenin lives
on—certainly in his writings.
The great Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, an intimate friend but sometimes
also a fierce critic of Lenin, once commented: “Outwardly he is all wrapped in
words, as a fish is covered with scales.” Gorky protested: “There was another
Lenin,” certainly different from Stoppard’s—as Gorky put it, “the splendid
comrade, the cheerful person with a live unflagging interest in everything in the
world, with an astonishingly kind approach to people.”4
But the words—revolutionary writings, political analyses, polemics—are
inseparable from this person, nonetheless. Another one-time intimate turned
fierce critic, Angelica Balabanoff, put it this way: “From his youth on, Lenin
was convinced that most of human suffering and of moral, legal, and social
deficiencies which torment and degrade humanity were caused by class
distinctions. He was also convinced that class struggle alone . . . could put an
end to exploiters and exploited and create a society of the free and equal. He
gave himself entirely to the attainment of this end and he used every means in
his power to achieve it.”5
The 1917 revolution that Lenin led was influenced by the radical-democratic
and socialist ideas of Karl Marx. It was carried out by Russia’s small but highly
organized working class, supported by enough of the peasant majority to make it
stick. It was opposed, attacked, and undermined in innumerable ways by the
world’s most powerful countries, but it cleared its way past the carnage of World
War I and the Russian Civil War, and a global superpower called the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (or Soviet Union) emerged. The word “Communism”
had originally meant an economy of abundant resources, controlled by all of the
people, in which the free development of each would be the condition for the
free development of all. Far from being a beacon of freedom and socialist
democracy, however, the Soviet Union became known as one of the most
repressive dictatorships in human history, particularly under Lenin’s successor,
Joseph Stalin, who took power in the late 1920s.6
“People tend to think of Stalinism as being . . . a perversion of Leninism,”
Stoppard commented in 1974. “That is an absurd and foolish untruth, and it is
one on which the Left bases itself. Lenin perverted Marxism, and Stalin carried
on from there.” This is as common a view as the notion of the humorless Lenin.
The engaging cultural-anarchist poet, Andrei Codrescu—a truly splendid,
independent-minded social commentator—in like manner challenges the image
(passed on by a British journalist in 1919) of Lenin as having “a joyous
temperament” prone to laughter.
Instead, Codrescu suggests, Lenin was somewhat “boring,” living up to
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s portrait as (in Codrescu’s summary) “a dour,
overwrought, frowning, anxious micromanager who becomes apoplectic and
enraged over small details, and has no time for shared pleasure, unless it is
sharing a mean joke with co-conspirators, a joke that moreover advances the
cause of the Revolution.” This seems to match Stoppard’s own portrayal of
Lenin in Zurich (except there is not even malicious joking). It will be worth
taking up the question of Lenin and laughter later, but any inclination to smile
freezes when Codrescu, like Stoppard, essentially puts Lenin on the same plane
as Stalin, characterizing him as “a mass murdering ideologue.”7
This equation of Lenin and Stalin has been challenged by insightful
observations of more than one knowledgeable anticommunist. In his classic The
Great Terror, Robert Conquest tells us: “Lenin’s Terror was the product of the
years of war and violence, of the collapse of society and administration, of the
desperate acts of rulers precariously riding the flood, and fighting for control and
survival.” The situation was quite different under Stalin, “who attained complete
control at a time when general conditions were calm. . . . It was in cold blood,
quite deliberately and unprovokedly, that Stalin started a new cycle of suffering.”
The qualitative break involved Stalin’s so-called revolution from above
beginning in 1929. This rapid industrialization and forced collectivization of
land rode roughshod over the workers and peasants. It generated millions of
deaths, the regimentation of culture, intensified repression, mass arrests, and
bloody purges. To declare that “Stalinism was the outcome of Leninism,”
Hannah Arendt has argued, obscures “the sheer criminality of the whole regime”
that made bloody purges and the gulag its centerpieces. Whittaker Chambers
made a similar point in 1956: “To become the embodiment of the revolutionary
idea in history Stalin had to corrupt Communism absolutely. . . . He sustained
this corruption with a blend of cunning and brute force. History knows nothing
similar on such a scale.”8
The authoritarian personality that both Stoppard and Codrescu perceive,
however, finds corroboration in Stefan Possony’s biography Lenin: The
Compulsive Revolutionary, which offers—if anything—an even more severe
judgment: “Self-righteous, rude, demanding, ruthless, despotic, formalistic,
bureaucratic, disciplined, cunning, intolerant, stubborn, one-sided, suspicious,
distant, asocial, cold-blooded, ambitious, purposive, vindictive, spiteful, a
grudgeholder, a coward who was able to face danger only when he deemed it
unavoidable—Lenin was a complete law unto himself and he was entirely serene
about it.”9
Often a biographer’s judgments of his subject’s personality, however, are
related to political considerations. A dyed-in-the-wool conservative such as
Possony is confident in the knowledge that some people, some classes, and some
races are superior to others, as he argued in another study, The Geography of
Intellect. Revolutions designed to overthrow those of superior intellectual and
cultural qualities, in the name of utopian notions of equality and “rule by the
people,” he informed his readers, destroy the very fabric of civilization, paving
the way for chaos and tyranny. Obviously, from this standpoint, Lenin—
committed to overturning the present social order to create a new and radically
democratic society of the free and the equal—is a monster.10
This naturally stands in contrast to the view of someone such as Leon
Trotsky, a revolutionary comrade, who disagreed with the assertion that Lenin
had made great sacrifices for the revolutionary cause. “Lenin did not sacrifice
himself,” Trotsky insisted. “On the contrary, he lived a full life, a wonderfully
abundant life, developing, expanding his whole personality, serving a cause
which he himself freely chose.” One need not be a revolutionary, however, to
perceive such positive characteristics in Lenin. A shrewd and knowledgeable
anticommunist, US diplomat George F. Kennan, has insightfully suggested the
difference between the leadership qualities of Lenin and Stalin, commenting that
Lenin “was spared that whole great burden of personal insecurity which rested
so heavily on Stalin. He never had to doubt his hold on the respect and
admiration of his colleagues. He could rule them through the love they bore him,
whereas Stalin was obliged to rule them through their fears.”11
The personal qualities to which both Trotsky and Kennan allude were noted
by many others in a position to know. The highly respected Lenin scholar Carter
Elwood (if anything anti-Leninist in his own orientation) has emphasized in his
new collection of penetrating essays, The Non-Geometric Lenin, that political
idolaters and many critics who focus exclusively on his revolutionary politics
miss “a man with non-revolutionary interests and human foibles,” but that
“neither the hagiographic nor the linear Lenin was a very interesting individual.”
Elwood notes “he was at times considerate and friendly, or on other occasions
condescending and demeaning, in the same fashion as many other people are
when confronted with complex personal problems.” He adds that “a balanced
and comprehensive view of Lenin” requires going beyond politics “to study his
relations with those around him” and as “a person with normal interests in food,
drink, holidays and tramping through the mountains.”12
Essential details on this “non-geometric Lenin” have, in fact, long been
available. According to so sharp a political opponent as the prominent
Menshevik Raphael Abramovitch, who knew him personally and spent time
visiting with him and his companion Nadezhda Krupskaya in their 1916 Swiss
exile, “it is difficult to conceive of a simpler, kinder and more unpretentious
person than Lenin at home.” Another Menshevik leader, Julius Martov,
concurred that there were not “any signs of personal pride in Lenin’s character,”
that he sought, “when in the company of others, an opportunity to acquire
knowledge rather than show off his own.”
Isaac Don Levine cited these comments in a 1924 study of Lenin. A Russian-
born US journalist who was uncompromisingly critical of Lenin but quite
familiar with the details of his life, Levine commented that the Communist
leader “derived genuine pleasure from associating with children and entertaining
them,” and that he had an “effeminate weakness for cats, which he liked to
cuddle and play with.” The knowledgeable Levine reported that other
enthusiasms included bicycling, amateur photography, chess, skating,
swimming, hunting—though Lenin was sometimes not inclined to actually shoot
the animals he hunted (“well, he was so beautiful, you know,” he said of a fox
whose life he refused to take). According to one acquaintance, British diplomat
Bruce Lockhart, he was “the father of modern ‘hiking’ . . . a passionate lover of
outdoor life.” And, of course, Lenin loved music. “During his life in Switzerland
Lenin immensely enjoyed the home concerts that the political emigrants
improvised among themselves,” the journalist reported. “When a player or singer
was really gifted, Lenin would throw his head back on the sofa, lock his knees
into his arms, and listen with an interest so absorbing that it seemed as if he were
experiencing something very deep and mysterious.”13
Other, more explicitly, political qualities were naturally also emphasized by
the shrewd anticommunist Levine—those of a personality “concise in speech,
energetic in action, and matter-of-fact,” with an unshakeable faith in Marxism,
although “extraordinarily agile and pliant as to methods,” with an “erudition”
that could be termed “vast.” His “capacity to back up his contentions [was]
brilliant.” While he had an ability “to readily acknowledge tactical mistakes and
defeats,” he was never willing to consider “the possible invalidity of his great
idea” (revolutionary Marxism). Years later, the US State Department’s most
capable “old Russia hand” George F. Kennan—in no way a Marxist or socialist
—would offer the opinion that Lenin represented “a critical intelligence second
to none in the socialist movement.” Levine’s conclusion summarizes: “The
extraordinary phenomenon about Lenin is that he combined this unshakeable,
almost fanatic, faith with a total absence of personal ambition, arrogance or
pride. Unselfish and irreproachable in his character, of a retiring disposition,
almost ascetic in his habits, extremely modest and gentle in his direct contact
with people, although peremptory and derisive in his treatment of political
enemies, Lenin could be daring and provocative in his policies.”14
Among the more provocative of Lenin’s political writings, at least in
retrospect, was his 1905 article “Party Organization and Party Literature,” from
which Stoppard draws for some key Lenin dialogue in the play Travesties—as
Stoppard puts it, “there’s a sense in which Lenin keeps convicting himself out of
his own mouth.” In his study of Stoppard’s plays, John Fleming emphasizes that
the playwright was becoming “personally and artistically involved in
condemning Eastern Bloc repression,” especially political restraints imposed on
free artistic expression, policies that seem to be advocated in Lenin’s 1905 essay.
Stoppard’s understanding of this essay mirrors that of the triumphant Stalinist
bureaucracy of the 1930s and 1940s. In his 1934 classic Artists in Uniform,
however, Max Eastman—denouncing the Stalinist regimentation of the arts (in
contradiction to the relative cultural freedom and creativity of the 1920s)—
emphasized that Lenin’s 1905 essay “was written under capitalism and tzarism,
and was, even so, devoted solely to the question of whether ‘party literature,’
having been in the previous illegal period free from control of the party, should
in the new legal period come under that control.” As Robert C. Tucker
commented years later, although “it seems clear from the article that Lenin was
speaking primarily of political writings,” Stalin’s bureaucratic regime
appropriated the article for its own purposes—claiming “Leninist authority for
the established practice of party control and censorship of all cultural expression
in Soviet Russia.”15
Anatoly Lunacharsky, people’s commissar of education in the Soviet
Republic, pointed out “Vladimir Ilyich never made guiding principles out of his
aesthetical likes and dislikes.” His cultural tastes tended to be relatively
conservative. As he explained to the seasoned German Communist leader Clara
Zetkin (who tended to agree with him): “It is beyond me to consider the products
of expressionism, futurism, cubism and other ‘isms’ the highest manifestation of
artistic genius. I do not understand them. I experience no joy from them.” But far
from seeking to repress them, he said in the next breath: “Yes dear Clara, it can’t
be helped. We’re both old fogies. For us it is enough that we remain young and
are among the foremost at least in matters concerning the revolution. But we
won’t be able to keep pace with the new art; we’ll just have to come trailing
behind.” Adding that “our opinion on art is not the important thing,” he
emphasized: “Art belongs to the people. . . . For art to get closer to the people
and the people to art we must start by raising general educational and cultural
standards.”16
It may be worthwhile returning to the question of laughter—which was
observed by more than one stray British journalist. “I have never met anyone
who could laugh so infectiously as Vladimir Ilyich,” commented Maxim Gorky.
“It was even strange that this grim realist who so poignantly saw and felt the
inevitability of great social tragedies, the man who was unbending and
implacable in his hatred of the capitalist world, could laugh so naively, could
laugh to tears, barely able to catch his breath.” Trotsky agreed: “At some
gatherings at which there were not many people, Lenin would sometimes have a
fit of laughter, and that happened not only when things went well, but even
during hard and difficult moments. He tried to control himself as long as he
could, but finally he would burst out with a peal of laughter which infected all
the others.” Lunacharsky agreed: “Life bubbles and sparkles within him.” The
cousin of Winston Churchill, the sculptor Clare Sheridan, saw the same thing as
she labored to mold a likeness of the revolutionary leader. Lenin’s condition for
allowing her to do this was that he not be interrupted in his work—for example,
when a worker came in to discuss important matters with him. She offered this
description: “The Comrade remained a long time, and conversation [with Lenin]
was very animated. Never did I see any one make so many faces. Lenin laughed
and frowned, and looked thoughtful, sad, and humorous all in turn. His eyebrows
twitched, sometimes they went right up, and then they puckered together
maliciously.”17
The personal qualities we have been reviewing here had political impact. It is
interesting to return to the insightful reflection offered by George Kennan:
Endowed with this temperament, Lenin was able to communicate to his associates an atmosphere
of militant optimism, of good cheer and steadfastness and comradely loyalty, which made him the
object of their deepest admiration and affection and permitted them to apply their entire energy to
the work at hand, confident that if this work was well done they would not lack for support and
appreciation at the top of the Party. In these circumstances, while Lenin’s ultimate authority
remained unquestioned, it was possible to spread initiative and responsibility much further than
was ever the case in the heyday of Stalin’s power.18

Lenin’s leadership style was organically connected not only with his
personality, of course, but also with his political orientation. His starting point
was the elemental Marxist belief in the necessary interconnection of socialist
theory and practice with the working class and labor movement. The working-
class majority cannot adequately defend its actual interests and overcome its
oppression, in his view, without embracing the goal of socialism—an economic
system in which the economy is socially owned and democratically controlled in
order to meet the needs of all people. Inseparable from this is a basic
understanding of the working class as it is, which involves a grasp of the
diversity and unevenness of working-class experience and consciousness. This
calls for the development of a practical revolutionary approach seeking to
connect in serious ways with the various sectors and layers of the working class.
This fundamental orientation is the basis of other key perspectives that one
can find in his writings. One involves socialist and working-class support for
struggles of all who suffer oppression, and a conception of forging social
alliances and united fronts to advance these and other struggles. There is also an
approach of integrating reform struggles with revolutionary strategy, a
remarkable understanding of the manner in which democratic struggles flow into
socialist revolution, as well as the need for working-class supremacy (or
hegemony) if such struggles are to triumph. Lenin’s vibrant, revolutionary
internationalist approach involves the interconnection of working-class struggles
in all countries, also encompassing a profound analysis of both nationalism and
imperialism. All this is drawn together in a coherent conception of organization
that is practical, democratic, and revolutionary.19
Ours is a time of social, economic, cultural, and political crises that, in
multiple countries, have been generating a variety of insurgencies, occupations,
and militant struggles to challenge the globalization policies of the powerful
business corporations dominating our planet and to mobilize increasing layers of
the 99 percent to challenge the oppressive and exploitative power of the wealthy
1 percent.20
Recalling Frederic Jameson’s notion of a Lenin who is unaware that he is
dead, it is possible to conceive of a renewal of the ideas and politics that Lenin
actually represented. It is intriguing that precisely at this time there has been the
revival of a play having Lenin as a major character. Lenin may symbolize
something different now than was the case either twenty or forty years ago. Just
as Shakespeare plays experience new interpretations and new meanings at
different points in history, so might future incarnations of this Tom Stoppard
play take on a new meaning—with Lenin as a revolutionary symbol, associated
with liberating ideas (and perhaps a bit more humor), taking on new life in our
time of troubles.21
Chapter Four
STILL KICKING: LENIN AND HIS BIOGRAPHERS

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin remains an object of interest to people around the world
even today. The fire of revolutionary Marxism, after the amazing flare-up that
Lenin helped orchestrate, has been reduced to glowing embers nurtured by
unpredictable breezes. Many people have no clear conception, or no conception
at all, of who this man was, but there are significant numbers who do. For some
he remains an object of fear and hate, for others of passionate hope, for some of
disappointment—with others defined by yet other categories. “Tell me what you
think of Lenin,” writes historian Christopher Read, “and I will tell you who you
are.” One of the most challenging and idiosyncratic political theorists of the
twentieth century, Hannah Arendt, commented in her 1963 reflection On
Revolution, that “it is perhaps noteworthy that Lenin, unlike Hitler and Stalin,
has not yet found his definitive biographer, although he was not merely a ‘better’
but an incomparably simpler man; it may be because his role in twentieth-
century history is so much more equivocal and difficult to understand.”1
The full-scale biographies emerging in the last half of the twentieth century
were all problematical. Those produced in the Soviet Union presented a granite
statue of greatness, used to justify the existing order: the icon had been
wonderful in every way and correct about everything, and universally loved by
all people except for those who were enemies of humanity. After the collapse of
the Soviet Union, academic careerists switched to “catch up” with the worst of
US works from an earlier era—Stefan Possony’s Lenin: The Compulsive
Revolutionary and Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Lenin, bent on
portraying Lenin as an evil genius, consistent with so much of Cold War
anticommunism. David Shub’s Lenin was the Cold War product of a former
Menshevik opponent of Lenin’s—better than those just mentioned, but with
obvious biases and in different ways also serving the anticommunist purposes of
the time. Louis Fischer, an ex-leftist journalist, produced a critical but not hostile
Life of Lenin that focused on his later years, after the 1917 revolution, in the
period when Fischer was a Russia correspondent for the US press. Adam Ulam’s
work of popular scholarship, The Bolsheviks, in which an account of Lenin’s life
was embedded, described an authoritarian Lenin who had never really been a
Marxist.
Better than fussing with any or all of these would be to read three works, in
the following order, by people with a surer grasp of who and what Lenin was:
Leon Trotsky’s The Young Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of
Lenin, and Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle. There are also non-
biographical works that focus on Lenin’s political thought: Alfred Meyer’s
Leninism, a Cold War anticommunist study, and two works that were not—
Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin and Neil Harding’s Lenin’s Political
Thought. Blending an intensive focus on Lenin’s political thought with a lightly
drawn biography is the three-volume Lenin, by Tony Cliff. Utilizing Lenin’s
Collected Works plus various scholarly articles and books, Cliff hoped to guide
like-minded activists in their efforts to build the British Socialist Workers Party
and its sister organizations around the world. There are varying opinions of the
results, with debate still swirling.2
The post–Cold War collapse of Communism has not meant the collapse of
Lenin studies. With the dawn of the twenty-first century there have been at least
six English-language works on Lenin’s life, and a proliferating number of
examinations of various aspects of his ideas. The two most valuable syntheses
are by Christopher Read and Lars Lih, and we can see why, first of all, by briefly
surveying the others.

Bad Man
Robert Service was the first out of the gate in 2000 with his five-hundred-page
Lenin: A Biography. There were a number of us who were hopeful that this
would be a very substantial and even path-breaking contribution, and this for
several reasons. Here was an experienced historian who knew Russian and had
been able to gain entrance into newly opened archives—but there was more. In
1979 he had produced an important study entitled The Bolshevik Party in
Revolution 1917–1923: A Study in Organizational Change, which dealt with the
vitally important issue of how a genuinely revolutionary party of 1917 was
transformed by the early 1920s into an increasingly less democratic and
bureaucratized structure. It seemed a work by someone whose sympathies were
on the left, especially leaning toward the Workers’ Opposition in the Bolshevik
party, perhaps too quick to make negative judgments of Lenin and sometimes
even flippant in tone—but providing important information and ideas. In 1991
the initial edition of his succinct survey The Russian Revolution, 1900-1927
appeared, and despite a quibble one might have with details, it seemed a good
and reliable summary.
More complex, and more impressive, was his three-volume biography of
Lenin that appeared between 1985 and 1995. The author became increasingly
critical of his subject as the years went by, although by no means dismissive, and
for anyone who had combed through Lenin’s writings, it was clear from these
volumes that Service had also been there. Not inclined to quote, he provided
extensive summaries, offering slants one might question but certainly
corresponding to what Lenin had written, and connecting texts with historical
contexts and critical-minded commentary that one felt merited attention. Also,
when Ronald W. Clark—the experienced and very capable biographer—died
before finishing his own useful five-hundred-page work entitled Lenin: A
Biography, Service was the person called in to help prepare this informative and
sympathetic account for final publication in 1988.
Lenin’s “vision of a future for mankind when all exploitation and oppression
would disappear was sincere,” Service wrote in the conclusion of his third Lenin
volume. “This surely is the central point of his life.” He added that Lenin and his
comrades were also responsible for the authoritarian reality that took hold in
Soviet Russia, but that masses of people around the world had responded to the
hopeful vision Lenin represented in response “to the conditions of distress, social
and political, in their own countries,” adding: “In most of these societies these
conditions have not been improved in the years after Lenin’s death. Only a
minority of the globe’s national economies have provided prosperity for most of
their people.” Given this, he concluded, “it would be foolhardy” to predict that
Lenin’s influence might not yet be felt in the future—although he clearly did not
see this as cause for elation. In his 2000 biography he makes a similar point—
but not quite: “It is not even impossible that his memory might again be invoked,
not necessarily by card-carrying communists, in those many parts of the world
where capitalism causes grievous social distress. Lenin is not quite dead, at least
not yet.”3
Service’s new biography seemed focused on finishing him off. The propensity
for flippant editorializing and personal denigration (buttressed by superficial
references to evidence) was much more pronounced than in his three-volume
work. The popularized condensation of the earlier volumes formed the backbone
of the new book. Although much was made of new archival material, there was
little revelatory material actually presented, and nothing that explained the tone
of unrelenting hostility by Service toward his subject. This disappointing book
certainly failed to achieve the “balanced” scholarship promised in the
introduction, but it said what many wanted to hear, and received accolades as
“the most authoritative and well-rounded biography of Lenin yet written—and
the one that is, in its quiet way, the most horrifying” (according to one blurb on
the back cover of the paperback edition). But for those who were familiar with
the other biographies of Lenin, with the scholarship on the Russian Revolution,
with the specifics of Marxist theory, and who—like the younger Service—felt
that an oppressive and exploitative capitalism should be replaced by the
democratic humanism at the heart of socialism, the praise seemed hollow.
A newer contribution that appeared in 2010—Conspirator: Lenin in Exile—is
premised, in part, on the intelligent insight that since most of Lenin’s life, from
1902 to 1917, was lived in exile, that period (more than the brief years of
revolution and power—1917–23) is the obvious focal point for a biographer who
wants to understand the person Lenin was. The problem is that author Helen
Rappaport felt she already “understood” the person Lenin was, and she despised
him. Among her strengths is that she is fluent in Russian and has a feel for
Russian culture (and consequently served as a consultant to playwright Tom
Stoppard for his remarkable Coasts of Utopia trilogy on nineteenth-century
Russian intellectuals), all of which was obviously helpful for someone who
confesses that she is not a professional historian. And she does seem to have
read a considerable amount in preparation for this book—which may be the
meaning of the Shakespeare quote she offers at the beginning of Conspirator:
POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.

Indeed, Rappaport is not particularly interested in the “words, words, words”

of Marxist theory and revolutionary polemic that were at the center of Lenin’s
life, nor is she particularly interested in the labor movement, the class struggle,
the lives of workers, or the plight of the oppressed that were the focal point of all
that he did. She is much more interested in the places where he lived in exile,
many of which she has made a point of visiting. She also is interested in
speculations that he spent a lot of time with prostitutes (with minimal evidence,
she concludes that he did) and contracted venereal disease (she spends
significant time on this “probability”—as does Service, incidentally—based on
inconclusive accounts and latter-day medical conjectures). But beyond that,
Rappaport helps us see Lenin as a “narrow authoritarian,” who frothed at the
mouth when speaking, who gloried in political manipulations, surrounding
himself with yes-men and hatchet-men helping him rise to power, and was a man
whose “mobile, malicious little eyes” revealed “something ruthless and
predatory.”4 For those who want to loathe Lenin, this book is invaluable. For
those wanting to get a firmer grasp on what happened in history, it isn’t.

Scholarly Gems
Perhaps this is the place to discuss the work of Carter Elwood’s important and
influential series of essays gathered in The Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the
Development of the Bolshevik Party 1910-1914.5 This collection is a gem for any
serious-minded scholar. Like Service and Rappaport, Elwood is hostile to what
he understands as key aspects of Lenin’s politics—but unlike them, he is a
meticulous researcher, not inclined to jump to conclusions, inclined to take very
seriously the specifics of the workers’ and socialist movements in
prerevolutionary Russia, time and again demonstrating a scholarly integrity that
demands respect from anyone who cares about the history that Elwood is
studying. In addition to this collection of essays, he has written three extremely
valuable books—one on the underground activity of the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party, focusing on the Ukraine from 1907 to 1914, another on
an agent-provocateur in the top leadership of the Bolsheviks, Roman
Malinovsky, and finally a biography of an outstanding leading activist and
feminist in the Bolshevik ranks, Inessa Armand. (Armand is rumored to have
had a fleeting affair with Lenin—in the biography Elwood says it’s not true, but
in a new essay contained here he concludes that it is.6)
Elwood is inclined to accept aspects of what Lars Lih has denounced as “the
textbook version” of Lenin developed in the days of Cold War anticommunism
—that Lenin was inclined toward an undemocratic, elitist, manipulative mode of
functioning and organization-building. This influences much of the way that he
interprets the evidence he presents—but he also presents a considerable amount
of evidence that doesn’t fit neatly into this schema (with Bolshevik comrades
over and over disagreeing with him, not taking his advice, outvoting him, not
agreeing to print his articles, and so on). More than that, Elwood displays a
genuine interest in the actual people he is writing about, including Lenin. The
book of essays is divided into two sections, one primarily political (focused on
Lenin’s efforts to build the Bolshevik Party), the other focused more on Lenin’s
personality and daily life. The meaning of the book’s title—The Non-Geometric
Lenin—highlights what Elwood sees as a “non-linear” and more lifelike
complexity in Lenin, with discontinuities between his political practice and his
more complex human qualities (for which Elwood displays more sympathy).
Recent contributions by two other serious scholars also add to the human
dimensions of this revolutionary figure. It is illuminating, as we try to
understand the humanity of a historical figure such as Lenin—to rescue him
from being a statue—to be able to see him in relation to his parents and siblings,
in the dynamic family context within which he grew up. There were three sisters
and two brothers in Lenin’s life, and we are fortunate to have studies of the
sisters and of the elder brother.
In her fascinating book Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the
Russian Revolution, Katy Turton complains of what she calls “the solar system
myth.” Many accounts by Lenin worshippers and haters alike picture Lenin as
“the sun in the planetary system in the Ulyanovs,” around which the others
orbited in awe and adoration. In focusing on Anna, Olga (to whom Lenin was
closest, and who died in 1890) and Maria Ulyanov, she portrays distinct
personalities and independent lives. Highly educated and cultured, on their own
terms they became—like so many of their generation—part of “the revolutionary
community, in which women and men worked together, formed friendships and
families, and campaigned to bring about the transformation of Russian society.”
Anna was the older sister and became deeply involved in revolutionary activity
in the mid-1880s (well in advance of the teenaged Volodya, the future Lenin).
Olga Ulyanova, a few years later—when she and Volodya were in close contact
and still getting their political bearings—wrote that “the aspiration towards truth
and to the ideal is in people’s souls,” adding: “One must always believe in
people, in the possibility of something better on earth, despite personal
disappointment. . . . If one doesn’t believe in people, doesn’t love them, then
what is one living for?” When she died, a classmate wrote to her own brother:
“Oh Arsenii, if only you knew what sort of person Ulyanova was. How much
hope was placed in her! It is safe to say that in Ulyanova Russia has lost an
honest, tireless activist. . . . She was a person of brilliant mind, intellectual
maturity, education, talent. . . . She read the best works on political economy and
sociology.”7
Philip Pomper, in Lenin’s Brother, tells the story of Alexander Ulyanov, born
two years after his sister Anna, like her drawn into revolutionary activity, and
swept up in arrest and execution in the late 1880s due to a revolutionary
conspiracy to assassinate the tsar. Alexander’s own story is the focus of this
study, and he had powerful impact on the future of Lenin and his sisters, but
particularly interesting for our purposes is information offered on Lenin’s
childhood. Pomper, not sympathetic to what he tells us about Lenin’s mature
political orientation, summarizes his own research on the little boy: “Volodya
was the most outgoing and playful of the three older children—perhaps the most
winning one to outsiders. In fact, one might speculate that he was
psychologically the healthiest of the three, though this would be difficult to infer
from Anna’s memoirs.” Anna described the psychological severity of her
schoolmaster father on herself, Alexander, and the younger children, explaining:
Father was against “showering people with praise,” as he put it, considering it extremely harmful
for people to have high opinions of themselves. Now, as I look back on our childhood, I think that
it would have been better for us if this generally applied pedagogical line had been administered
less strictly. It was fully correct only for Vladimir, whose vast self-confidence and constantly
distinguished achievement in school called for a corrective. In no way affecting his accurate self-
assessment, it undoubtedly reduced the arrogance, which children with outstanding abilities are
prone to . . . and taught him, in spite of all the praise, to work diligently.

Pomper adds that Lenin was “physically the spitting image of his father,” and
that “just beneath the surface of Ilya Nikolaevich’s severity, there was a streak of
mischievous humor, a quality completely alien to his older son and characteristic

8
of Volodya.”8

Hazards of Scholarly Balance

Of course, such gems may contribute to, but cannot substitute for, a more
rounded and unified understanding of Lenin. This is attempted by two serious
scholars reaching for a greater balance than that achieved by Service’s work (not
to mention Rappaport’s)—Beryl Williams’s Lenin (2000), and James D. White’s
Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution (2001). In addition, each is
packed with a considerable amount of information—both authors have obviously
immersed themselves in older sources and especially the more recent
scholarship. In a sense, this is one of the reasons that both books fail as durable
biographical studies.
What they tend to be “balancing” are the various works of scholarship on
Lenin, and one can learn much from that. But sometimes trying to balance the
various scholarly studies—particularly at a certain moment in history—cannot
provide the much-desired “objectivity” that is the goal of many serious scholars.
As the 1990s were fading into the early twenty-first century, it seemed clear to
most scholars (including in the former Soviet Union) that Communism had been
“the road to nowhere” and that the entire effort had been an insupportable waste
of time and life and resources, a fault that could be traced to the very moment of
revolutionary conception. The prevailing moods and trends in academe in the
1990s were inclined to embrace the old Cold War anticommunist interpretation
of Lenin—in some cases with even darker colors, in others with greater nuance,
but most were also more inclined than ever to underscore continuity with the
brutality of Stalinism. The effort to “balance” such scholarship, however, gives
us more second-hand judgments but less actual Lenin. This may be better than
what Rappaport and even Service have produced, but it falls short of “the real
stuff” that someone like Elwood seems more adept at working toward.
Their conclusions to some extent reflect the problem. Shortly before the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Williams notes, a public opinion poll under
Gorbachev asked Soviet citizens who were the most important world figures of
all ages. First was the modernizing tsar of the eighteenth century, Peter the
Great. Second was Jesus. Third was Lenin. Here is what Williams does with this:
Like Christ he became for his people a martyr and a saint, whose teachings could not be
challenged; like Peter his revolution was one of Westernization and modernization, often through
barbaric methods. His experiment with human nature lasted 74 years. At the end of it, however,
Russians and Russia, let alone the world, proved remarkably resistant to his vision of socialism.
The brave new world failed to materialize. In the long run, as Russians admitted under
Gorbachev, the end did not justify the means.9

This is more consistent with the mood of Williams and those around her in
the year 2000 than with what Lenin said (he never claimed to have established
socialism, nor was he seeking to change human nature) or with the complexities
of Soviet experience. But then consider White’s conclusion. He starts with the
interesting comment by E. H. Carr that (in White’s paraphrase) “the Bolsheviks
not only made a revolution, but analyzed and prepared the conditions in which it
could be made.” He goes on to suggest that this is an illusion, that “first Lenin
and then Stalin had made great efforts to create that impression,” and he
concludes: “Before we can know whether a ‘self-conscious’ revolution of the
kind Carr had in mind is at all possible, it is necessary to clear away the
confusion that Lenin and his successors have created.”10 Aside from the linkage
of Lenin and Stalin, at least as manipulators of the truth who created illusions
about Bolsheviks strengths, White’s book ends with the “balanced” injunction
that we must clear away Lenin’s thought before we can know whether a self-
conscious revolution is actually possible.

Taking Lenin Seriously

The great strength of Christopher Read’s Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (2005) and
Lars Lih’s Lenin (2011) is that they take Lenin seriously in ways that most others
do not (with the partial exception of Elwood). They give attention to the
proliferating array of interpretations and secondary sources, but they are
determined to form their own judgments through a serious-minded engagement
with primary sources. First of all, they engage with what Lenin himself had to
say, both in published sources and correspondence, and they read these in a
critical-minded way—not hostile, but not assuming that Lenin’s words are the
fount of Truth, and also not assuming that Lenin was simply lying and
manipulating in order to advance his own dark (dictatorial, proto-Stalinist)
designs.
It is interesting to take some time to unpack what it means to take Lenin
seriously. Here are two statements that, taken together, often cause confusion.
Statement number 1: Lenin wanted to achieve a society of the free and the equal,
and he wanted to establish rule by the working class over society’s political and
economic life. Statement number 2: What ended up being established in the
Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, was one of the worst dictatorships in
human history.
Read and Lih understand the truth of both statements. Unlike so many, they
do not assume that Lenin was talking about freedom and democracy and
workers’ control simply in order to establish a brutal dictatorship. Nor do they
appear to believe that democracy and socialism are foolish illusions. In this
sense, for example, they take Lenin seriously. It then remains to be seen how
Lenin’s words actually played out in practice, and also how one might explain
why things turned out so differently from what Lenin said he was reaching for.
In other ways, too, they show a respect for Lenin’s ideas by 1) taking the time
to see what they are, 2) placing them in context, 3) seeing what others of the
time were saying, and 4) trying to understand how things played out. More than
this, they are inclined to see Lenin neither as a demon nor a saint but as the
interesting and remarkable person that he was. They look at his life,
relationships, and everyday activities in a manner consistent with the rich
material gathered in Elwood’s Non-Geometric Lenin.
In the scholarly apparatus of each book it seems clear that Lih and Read think
highly of each other’s contributions. At the same time, the two biographies,
while sharing much common ground and similarities of approach, are different
in significant ways.
There is an oblique quality to Lih’s book—focusing on key moments in the
history of the Russian revolutionary movement in which Lenin was centrally
involved, and often focusing on the impressions and ideas of others in order to
contextualize and then zero in on what Lenin was thinking and doing. At the
same time, the overall result tends to be a rounded and insightful presentation of
Lenin’s life and politics. Read, on the other hand, is almost always focused
directly on Lenin’s life and ideas—adding context in generous amounts at
appropriate points. As he tells us, his key primary source is Lenin’s Collected
Works (including, importantly, his correspondence), supplemented by a generous
and critical-minded use of Krupskaya’s Reminiscences (plus reference to other,
less friendly memoirs by former Bolsheviks Nikolai Valentinov and Angelica
Balabanoff, as well as the outstanding book-length chronology by Gerda and
Hermann Weber, Lenin: Life and Works), and only then the scholarship of others.
Read views Lenin as seeking to create a democratic upsurge for socialist
revolution, led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry. The problem
begins when the Bolshevik Revolution, as a radical-democratic insurgency, is
successful in 1917. Then all hell breaks loose, and amid the violence and chaos
of counterrevolutionary assault and economic collapse the radical-democratic
scenario that had been central to Lenin’s Bolshevism falls apart. We then see
Lenin and his comrades scramble as best they can to hold things together. In the
process, something very different takes shape than what had been projected in
the revolutionary upsurge of 1917. A brutality and authoritarianism crystallize as
part of the new order, and this creates preconditions for what will become known
as Stalinism.

Problems of a Revolutionary Life

Of course, no book is perfect, and in Read’s book there are simple factual errors
worth noting.

• One of the errors may simply be a bit of unclear writing. On page 67,
Read talks about the German revisionist Eduard Bernstein putting
forward the notion that instead of resorting to a revolutionary overturn,
socialists could just gradually reform the problems of capitalism out of
existence. Then he eases into a discussion of Lenin’s Menshevik
opponents on page 68—but it is simply not the case that a majority of
the Mensheviks were adherents of Bernstein’s reformism. Like Lenin,
they were inclined to line up with the “orthodox” Marxism of Karl
Kautsky.
• On page 92, again in regard to the Mensheviks, Read has Lenin
referring to them as “liquidationists” because they favored a less
centralized party than Lenin—but that was absolutely not the meaning
of the term for Lenin or anyone else. Liquidators were that current
among the Mensheviks after 1906 who wanted to abandon illegal
underground work in tsarist Russia.
• On page 114, in an uncharacteristically fuzzy discussion of Lenin’s
ideas (specifically on national self-determination), Read mistakenly
asserts that for Rosa Luxemburg “Polish independence was a goal in
itself” when—as a revolutionary anti-nationalist—she in fact opposed
the struggle for an independent Poland, while Lenin, an advocate of
self-determination for oppressed nationalities, supported it.
• On page 164, it is stated that Trotsky attacked “Lenin’s concept of the
Party and associated ‘democratic centralism.’” While the young
Trotsky more than once attacked Lenin’s ideas on party organization,
he never attacked “democratic centralism” (the notion of freedom of
discussion, unity in action), a term first introduced by the Mensheviks,
then embraced by the Bolsheviks. Later it was turned into something
entirely different in the Stalinized Communist movement, and in the
 studies of Cold War academics—but that is another matter.
• On page 167, it is suggested that the nineteenth-century French
revolutionary Auguste Blanqui was an anarchist—but he wasn’t.
• On page 239, we are told that “Lenin had been uncompromising from
the first with any attempt to allow [religious] believers to join the
Party.” This is not true. In his 1905 article “Religion and Socialism,”
while he calls religion “the opium of the people,” he also indicates that
“we [do] not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our
party.”11

These errors, the sort that crop up in almost any book dealing with complex
themes ranging over a significant swath of history, are not central to Read’s
narrative and analysis. Much more important is the way he defines “Leninism.”
Although plausibly suggesting that Lenin was partly shaped by the Russian
traditions of revolutionary populism (and, perhaps less plausibly, by elements of
Bakunin’s anarchist thought), Read is very much of the opinion that Lenin’s
thought was thoroughly grounded in the principles of revolutionary Marxism,
with its belief in the possibility and need for working-class revolution and its
socialist goal envisioning a radical democracy and society of the free and the
equal. And yet Read wrestles, as we all must wrestle, with a disturbing truth:
“From our perspective of examining Lenin’s life, perhaps the most extraordinary
and ironic feature is that, while he retained such ultra-democratic ideas in his
head, Lenin presided in practice over the emergence of one of the most intrusive
bureaucratic state structures the world had ever seen.”12
Read believes that the answer to the riddle, in part, can be found in a fatal
flaw at the very heart of Leninism. In addition to the “ultra-democratic”
perspectives of Marxism that he acknowledges were central to Lenin’s
theoretical orientation, Read believes another element was no less essential to
Leninism—something that hardened in him during his early Siberian exile,
adding an “extra steel” that was indispensable to “Lenin’s own distinctive
revolutionary theory and practice.” He therefore became the truly “Leninist”
Lenin only when “his manipulativeness and dogmatism were in full flow.”13
Amid the balanced discussion of Lenin’s personality, his serious-minded
engagement with Lenin’s Marxism, his thoughtful discussion of positive and
reasonable qualities of what Lenin thought and said and did, there is this darker
element that Read sees as essential for understanding who Lenin was and how he
impacted history. In taking this analytical turn, he employs a more sophisticated
variant of the old “textbook” version of the undemocratic Lenin that Lars Lih
has done so much to demolish.
“The problems began to arise,” Read tells us, “when the culture of
centralization and secrecy inculcated by autocratic conditions became a habit
which could not be shaken off even when the conditions no longer prevailed.”
The Bolshevik/Menshevik split at the Second Congress of the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party revealed “a new side of Lenin, the ruthless, stop-at-
nothing side. He had not hesitated to split the movement though he does not
appear to have foreseen the development coming.” In building Bolshevism he
sought “a personally loyal instrument which, he hoped, would never let him
down,” and so he was determined to build a “party in his own, self-made
likeness.”14
Another contributing factor was Lenin’s notion that “no one but Lenin had
ever really understood Marxism,” so his loyalty to Marxism necessarily meant
“his failure to accept opposition.” He could not be patient in allowing reality to
teach comrades the validity of his own Marxist understanding—“Leninism was
Marxism in a hurry.” In fact, his great weakness was inseparable from his great
strength: “the energy and power of his intellectual creativity . . . was the feature
that attracted his supporters and repelled his enemies.”15
Theoretical rigidities apparently begat organizational rigidities. Read tells us
that between 1902 and 1904 Lenin’s “notion of the vanguard, elite party was
becoming increasingly divisive” and that “as time went by Lenin was carving
out a more and more radical and solitary path.” Lenin was continually engaged,
according to Read (with no clear documentation) in “purging his party of
heretics,” and he could not be stopped from continuing “his favorite pastime,
splitting an ever smaller party.” Read gets carried away with such formulations:
“To see his beloved Party adopting what he considered suicidal principles of
broad membership was too much for him to accept.” Such an orientation actually
eroded his Marxist convictions regarding the role of the working class—for him
there were recurrent “ambiguities about the revolutionary potential of the
Russian working class,” causing him more than once to fret over “working-class
backwardness.” Reaching for a link between Lenin’s allegedly undemocratic
notions in the prerevolutionary period and the post-revolutionary Communist
dictatorship, Read even suggests that “arguably . . . the elite began the
Revolution in 1917, not the masses” (though this flies in the face of much
evidence and even the thrust of Read’s own account). Perhaps the Bolsheviks
actually meant to establish “a one-party dictatorship” in 1917.16
This “textbook” distortion of Lenin and his politics is contradicted—and (it
seems to me) refuted—by material in such well-documented studies as Lars
Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered and my own Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, and it
stands as the most serious defect in Read’s work, at certain points tending to
bend it out of shape. There is ample evidence that Lenin was far more open,
proved able to tolerate and endure disagreement from his comrades, and, if
anything, was supremely confident in what Lih calls a “heroic” conception of the
workers’ inherent revolutionary potential. Rather than governing over his own
shrinking organizational kingdom, Lenin coordinated a party-building
orientation that ultimately resulted in the impressive growth, vitality, and class-
struggle relevance of the Bolsheviks. And as has been widely documented
(including in material that Read himself presents to us), the 1917 revolution was
essentially “ultra-democratic,” not authoritarian.
As indicated, the defect in Read’s interpretation is contradicted by evidence
that Read himself presents. He is compelled more than once in this biography to
puzzle over Lenin’s “un-Lenin-like” behavior. In a “stunning” letter to
Plekhanov in October 1905, he wrote: “We are in agreement with you over nine-
tenths of the questions of theory and tactics, and to quarrel over one-tenth is not
worthwhile.” Read comments that Lenin’s “new sense of urgency over
reconciliation” between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks “was clear as was its
motivation” amid the revolutionary opportunities of the 1905 upsurge. Nor was
this a one-time fluke. “The years were filled with intense squabbles with three
opponents—Trotsky, Bogdanov and the Mensheviks,” Read tells us. “Time after
time Lenin announced a complete break with one or another of the groups, only,
bewilderingly, to hold out hopes of unity shortly thereafter.” He also notes that
the Bolsheviks—absolutely committed to a government based on the democratic
councils of workers and other popular forces in 1917—were on record as
wanting to share power, in the soviets, with others committed to such a soviet
government.17
Plausible arguments can be made, given his humanity and the historical
record, that Lenin was sometimes supremely overconfident (or arrogant),
sometimes intolerant, sometimes inclined to indulge in polemical overkill,
sometimes naïvely short-sighted, sometimes afflicted with blindspots that could
have dire consequences. Such qualities were not the whole of Lenin, nor are they
essential to the body of theory that can be associated with the actual “Leninism”
of Lenin. Nonetheless, given the complexity of the historical process, and
Lenin’s centrality to aspects of it, one could argue that Lenin’s shortcomings (no
less than his strengths) were a factor in problems that emerged in the Russian
revolutionary experience. What Read does not successfully demonstrate,
however, is that these shortcomings were as consistent and potent as he suggests.
There were too many countervailing tendencies (in the Russian revolutionary
movement, in Lenin himself, and so on) for that to be so.
Revolutionary Tragedy
Good historian that he is, Read provides sufficient evidence for an alternative
explanation as to how the Russian Revolution “went wrong”—one that even
factors in Lenin’s actual shortcomings. As Read notes, in the four-year period
following the 1917 revolution, there was “a series of three strategies pursued by
Lenin”: first, the establishment of what could be called a “Commune-state”
(combined with a mixed economy that would gradually transition from
capitalism to socialism); second, the severe policies of “war communism” that
combined an authoritarian one-party dictatorship with the rapid (and damaging)
nationalization of the economy; and third, a New Economic Policy that
maintained one-party rule but shifted back to the utilization of market relations
to build up the economy. What is key for us—though Read often seems to forget
it—is that up to 1918 Lenin’s ideal, his first choice, was the Commune-state.
This means that Lenin’s initial intention was far from setting up a dictatorship
of the Russian Communist Party (the new name adopted by the Bolsheviks early
in 1918). As Read points out, the revolution had been led by the Bolsheviks, but
also involved were anarchists, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and even some
Mensheviks, as well as many nonparty workers—active in the soviets, factory
committees, unions, and workers’ militias. This corresponded with what Lenin
projected in The State and Revolution and other writings of 1917. The model of
the Paris Commune of 1871 indicated what the post-insurrectionary transition
was supposed to look like. Read notes that “Lenin called for ‘abolition of the
police, army and bureaucracy’, that is, the smashing of the existing state
machine.” It was to be replaced by the democratic soviets and the workers’
militias. “The people would be armed and therefore they could not be forced into
submission by armed external agencies,” is how he explains Lenin’s perspective.
“Bureaucratic and judicial functions would also be democratized by enforcing a
regular rotation of administrative tasks in which the whole population would
participate.” Read adds that “all ‘political’ functions could . . . be reduced to

18
accounting and control within the grasp of the average, literate intelligence.”18
Read makes clear that Lenin did not believe socialism was possible in Russia
unless it was aided by world revolution. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution
he was emphasizing the point, and as late as 1922 he was still emphasizing it:
1917: “Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backward of European countries. Socialism
cannot triumph there directly and immediately. But the peasant character of the country . . . may
make our revolution the prologue to the world socialist revolution, a step toward it.”
1922: “We have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth—that the joint efforts of the
workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism.”19

Read’s accusation—at least in this section of his book—is not that Lenin is a
manipulative authoritarian, but that his actual revolutionary-democratic vision is
incredibly naïve and unrealistic. He also suggests that Lenin and his comrades
concealed from the masses the Bolsheviks’ ultimate goals. “Mass support came
to the Bolsheviks as the only significant agents of what the masses wanted—
peace, bread, land and all power to the soviets,” he asserts. “It was emphatically
not a conversion to Bolshevik values and to the dreams embodied in The April
Theses and The State and Revolution.”20 Yet in all fairness, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks, while making “peace, bread, land” and “all power to the soviets”
their central slogans, were also very clear about the ultimate goals—world
revolution and socialism globally as well as in Russia. Consider Lenin’s very
public appeal the morning after the seizure of power:
Comrades, workers, soldiers, peasants and all working people! Take all power into the hands of
your soviets. . . . Gradually, with the consent and approval of the majority of the peasants, in
keeping with their practical experience and that of the workers, we shall go forward firmly and
unswervingly to the victory of socialism—a victory that will be sealed by the advanced workers
of the many civilized countries, bring the peoples lasting peace and liberate them from all
oppression and exploitation.21

In Lenin’s 1917–1918 scenario, then, class-conscious workers and their

steadfast allies among the poor peasants establish a revolutionary-democratic
commune-state that inspires workers’ revolutions throughout the world, setting
the stage for the development of a global socialist order of the free and the equal.
But “almost from the very first day of the October Revolution,” according to

22
Read, “Lenin’s hopes and expectations for it began to collapse.”22 There was, of
course, the horrific and destructive First World War—still raging when the
Bolsheviks took power—combined with a horrific civil war that arose after
1917, nurtured and funded by a number of powerful capitalist governments that
also sent in their own troops and orchestrated a debilitating economic blockade.
Although there was a wave of revolutionary upsurges in countries around the
world, none resulted in the hoped-for working-class socialist triumph, so the new
Soviet Republic remained fatally isolated. What’s more, the administrative
experience and cultural level of the overwhelming majority of ordinary Russian
workers and peasants proved woefully insufficient for sustaining the libertarian
commune-state envisioned by Lenin and his comrades. The result was chaos,
economic and social disintegration, and the dramatic erosion of the vibrant
popular upsurge that had given life to the democratic councils, the soviets, which
caused the newly named Communist Party, itself ill-prepared for overwhelming
tasks of governance and administration under such dire circumstances, to try to
step into the breach.
The other two strategies—“war communism” (1918–1921) and the New
Economic Policy (1921–1928)—followed. A key feature of both involved
replacing the shattered hopes for soviet democracy and the “commune-state”
with an emergency one-party dictatorship, buttressed initially by desperate
violence and authoritarian justifications (the “red terror”). As Read comments,
“one could argue that the cost of survival was the stifling of the revolution,”
although he also emphasizes that “from 1920 onwards the resort to terror was
much reduced and disappeared from Lenin’s mainstream discourses and
practices.”23 Lenin and his comrades bear considerable responsibility for these
developments, as Read shows us, and he goes on to offer challenging insights on
the dynamics that made the “temporary” bureaucratic dictatorship increasingly
powerful and durable.
Although the Communist dictatorship seemed relatively benign through much
of the 1920s, under Stalin’s steady hand it turned immense and increasingly
stifling, yet also voracious and murderous, as the 1920s gave way to the 1930s.
Read by no means equates Lenin with Stalin, and he acknowledges the well-
documented facts of “Lenin’s last struggle” against the embryonic beginnings of
Stalinism—but his partial adherence to the “textbook” interpretation of Lenin
encourages him, in the next breath, to suggest a different way of seeing things,
stressing (far more strongly than the evidence will allow) that in some ways
Stalin could be seen as Lenin’s legitimate heir, even though he also denies that
“Stalinism was the one and only potential outcome of Leninism.” Read insists
that the best in Lenin scholarship allows for the revolutionary’s humanity—“a
more realistic, balance, rounded, human portrayal of Lenin.”24 He himself has
done much, regardless of differences one might have with his interpretation, to
clear the path for a such scholarship.

Humanity and Revolution

“Oliver Cromwell insisted that his portrait should include ‘warts and all,’”
comments Lars Lih. “Post-Soviet studies of Lenin often seem to be based on a
methodology of ‘nothing but warts.’” Like Carter Elwood and Christopher Read,
he also has pushed past relentless negativity, and has also—more than most—
emphasized the necessity of engaging with the political ideas that animated this
twentieth-century revolutionary.25
Lih’s remarkable, reliable, deliciously readable new biography—Lenin—
stands as the best of the twenty-first century biographies considered here. We are
offered a succinct yet substantial work of scholarship that clearly presents the
life of a genuine revolutionary, in stark contrast to the cold-blooded totalitarian
monster that recent political fashions have dictated as the appropriate way of
seeing Lenin. Lih shattered myths about Lenin in his massive earlier volume,
Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context, and he has continued
that good work in this informative biography.
 We are presented here with someone steeped in Marxist thought, in fact “in
love” with Marx’s writings (as Lih nicely puts it), maintaining throughout his
life the belief in a “heroic working class.” To advance this scenario, Lenin
labored to develop a revolutionary party around the program of the majority
faction (the Bolsheviks) that he led. Fundamentally democratic, evolving
through sharp debates and disagreements, sometimes even splits (though
sometimes unifications), the Leninist organization Lih reveals is a collectivity of
activists in which Lenin was more than once overruled but within which he
earned considerable authority. Far from developing a blueprint for an
authoritarian order, Lenin’s “blueprints” (such as they were) projected a workers’
and peasants’ republic of democratic councils (soviets) that would, increasingly,
replace what he and other Marxists perceived as the economic dictatorship of
capitalism with the economic democracy of socialism. Of course, things did not
turn out that way.
This richly textured book, graced with a number of splendid and appropriate
illustrations, places Lenin securely in context: the context of European and
Russian history, the context of the broader socialist movement (a truly mass
phenomenon before World War I), the context of truly heroic workers’ struggles
and of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (and later the Communist
Party) that contained a number of other experienced and strong-minded
individuals. We are given a sense of the qualities that enabled this human being
to have the impact that he did in such contexts. An iron will is combined with a
brilliant intellect, with a profoundly realistic and practical theoretical and
organizational bent, yet also with a desire to learn from others and—by no
means inconsequentially—a capacity for charm and humor, and for genuine
kindness. At the same time, Lih perceives an overly confident inclination to see
a highly complex reality through the distorting lens of Lenin’s revolutionary
assumptions and his faith that the “heroic working class” could and would
overcome all obstacles.
This perspective could not survive the escalation of problems and horrific
crises that beset the revolutionary regime after 1917, Lih insists. True enough,
but one wonders if Lih is absolutely on target in concluding that Lenin’s
revolutionary orientation was “far from realistic.” Lenin is likened to the Biblical
Noah, confidently building his revolutionary ark as the floodwaters of political,
social, and economic catastrophe rose higher and higher. “As it turned out, the
ark was leaky because it was built on unsound assumptions, the voyage involved
more suffering than anyone had bargained for, and the ark ended up far from
where its builder planned.”26
It is difficult to judge Lenin’s purported lack of realism due to Lih’s
surprising failure (given the contrary emphasis in much of his other work) to
give adequate attention to the primary theoretical works produced by this
revolutionary who, as Lih himself emphasizes, took theory so seriously. “I am
still completely ‘in love’ with Marx and Engels,” Lenin confessed to Inessa
Armand in 1917, “and I can’t stand to hear them abused. No, really—they are
the genuine article.”27 Lenin is presented as being in the mainstream of the pro-
democracy, pro-worker Marxism prevalent in the world socialist movement of
his time. This was the Socialist International to which socialist parties around the
world, including Lenin’s own, were affiliated before the First World War tore it
apart. Its Marxism embraces the rich contributions of Karl Kautsky up to 1910,
as well as those of Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, David Riazanov, Leon
Trotsky, and others. Lenin’s distinctive interpretations and analyses were
developed very much in the midst of what Lih has termed “the best of Second
International Marxism.” The thoughtful Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky once
commented in his interesting old biography of Lenin that “Leninism is not
identical with the sum of Lenin’s outlook. The Marxist precedes in him the
creator of Leninism, and the vindication and reestablishment of genuine
Marxism was one of his principal tasks in life.”28
Lih would certainly agree with this. It may be, however, that it is his dogged
emphasis on Lenin’s affinity to Second International Marxism that contributes to
this volume’s greatest limitation: how little it offers on distinctive aspects of
Lenin’s Marxism. This especially comes through in the very light treatment
accorded to Lenin’s involvement in the deliberations and development of the
Communist International. This is especially serious, given that Lenin saw
revolutionary internationalism as key as to how to move beyond the excruciating
dilemmas coming out of World War I and posed by Soviet Russia’s post-
revolutionary isolation.
Lih’s failure to engage adequately with aspects of Lenin’s thought may also
help explain why—as is the case with Read—he seems not to take seriously
what Moshe Lewin called “Lenin’s last struggle” against the beginnings of what
would later be called “Stalinism.” He is not inclined to acquiesce, however, in
Christopher Read’s “detection” of embryonic Stalinism in Leninist precedents.
Lih stresses exactly the opposite, especially in regard to “the peasant question.”
(In stark contrast to Lenin’s worker-peasant alliance, the full “blossoming” of
Stalinism involved the so-called revolution from above, with the murderous and
disastrous forced collectivization of land initiated in 1929–30). The fact remains
that the question of revolutionary internationalism is a key to what drove some
of Lenin’s closest comrades into opposition to the Stalinist machine, but it
receives rather short shift in this volume. Valuable as Lih’s biography is, it seems
that Lenin—as Arendt put it years ago—has “not yet found his definitive
biographer.”
Yet Lih’s book deserves, and will probably find, a significant readership. In
the midst of proliferating waves of capitalist crisis, growing numbers of people
may also be “falling in love” with the ideas of Marx and Engels, and may
conclude that Lenin is “the genuine article” as well. A world in which more and
more of the population finds itself proletarianized and oppressed will tend to
generate people who may be attracted to the kind of Leninist thinking that Lars
Lih describes: “The party inspires the workers with a sense of their great mission
to lead the narod [the oppressed people], and the proletariat then carries out this
mission by inspiring the narod to join the workers in their crusade to overthrow
tsarism, thereby opening up the road that ultimately leads to socialism—this is
Lenin’s scenario.”29
Both Lih and Read sense that the study of Lenin is of more than simply
historic interest. “The influence of, and interest in, one of the most important
figures in the twentieth century is far from exhausted,” Read tells us at the end of
his own study. “Lenin’s future may hold as many surprises as his past.”30
Chapter Five
LENIN AND REVOLUTIONARY DEMOCRACY

In the introduction to the selection of Lenin’s writings that I edited, I argue that
Lenin’s perspectives were profoundly and radically democratic, and that “the
hope for the future may lie with those who are able to utilize the . . . lessons
from the Leninist experience in the struggles of the twenty-first century.” This
goes against influential interpretations of scholars stretching from Bertram D.
Wolfe through Leonard Schapiro to Richard Pipes, interpretations also informing
the views of many liberal and left-wing scholars and commentators. That view
sees Lenin as an authoritarian elitist bearing primary responsibility for the
totalitarian order established under his presumed disciple and heir, Joseph
Stalin.1
In disputing that interpretation, I will give attention to the Bolshevik tradition,
the historical reality that has sometimes been referred to as “Leninism.” As with
many important terms, this one is highly controversial—there are not only
multiple and utterly contradictory meanings, but there have also been those who
have argued that the term has no “scientific” value whatsoever. My meaning,
when I use the term Leninism, involves the combined theoretical, analytical,
strategic, tactical, and organizational approach consistent with the life and
thought and political practice of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov—popularly known as
Lenin. In this presentation I will tilt the balance toward a consideration of
Lenin’s party, which is seen as the microcosm of the totalitarian order that he
allegedly wished to impose.
Those who challenge the commonly held view certainly have some
explaining to do. If the Marxism of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin arguably represents a
powerful force for political freedom and genuine democracy, there is certainly
no denying that it gave way to the murderous bureaucratic tyranny associated
with Joseph Stalin. Adherents of Stalinism, perhaps wishing to see promising
beginnings of socialism in that tyrannical regime, naturally embraced the notion
that Lenin led to Stalin. The negative features of “actually existing socialism,”
and then its collapse, greatly undermined the credibility of “Leninism” for many.
Opponents of socialism and revolution (and also weary, disillusioned one-time
partisans) have also emphasized a deep bond between Lenin and Stalin—in
order to close off the revolutionary socialist path as anything that a thoughtful,
humane person would want to consider.
One of the problems with this, as I argue in Marx, Lenin, and the
Revolutionary Experience, is that if not enough thoughtful, humane people are
prepared to forge a revolutionary socialist path to the future, then political
freedom, genuine democracy, a decent life for all people, not to mention the
survival of human culture and planet Earth, might not be part of the future.2

Lenin and His Revolution

There is much more than discussions of “the organization question” in what this
revolutionary has to say to us. In the new selection of Lenin’s writings contained
in the volume Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, one sees the breadth and
coherence of his thinking in his emphasis on the need for socialist and working-
class support to struggles of all who suffer oppression, and in his way of
integrating reform struggles with revolutionary strategy.
Lenin’s insistence on the necessity of working-class political independence,
and on the need for working-class supremacy (or hegemony) if democratic and
reform struggles are to triumph is matched by his approach to social alliances
(such as the worker-peasant alliance) as a key aspect of the revolutionary
struggle. We also find his development of the united front tactic, in which
diverse political forces can work together for common goals, without
revolutionary organizations undermining their ability to pose effective
alternatives to the capitalist status quo. His profound analyses of capitalist
development, and of imperialism and of nationalism utilize, expand upon, and to
some extent deepen Marx’s own analyses.
Lenin’s vibrantly revolutionary internationalist orientation embraces the
laborers and oppressed peoples of the entire world in these writings. Especially
dramatic is his remarkable understanding of the manner in which democratic
struggles flow into socialist revolution. Challenging commonplace perspectives
in the socialist movement of his time, Lenin analyzes the nature of the state in
history, with a conceptualization (rooted in Marx and Engels yet at the same time
remarkably innovative) of triumphant working-class struggles generating a
deepening and expanding democracy that would ultimately cause the state to
wither away.
Of course, Lenin became the model revolutionary leader of the twentieth
century because he was the leader of the first revolutionary working-class
seizure of power in Russia. It is instructive to see how John Reed summarizes
this in his classic eyewitness account Ten Days That Shook the World. At one
point the focus is on Lenin as heroic mass leader: “So, Lenin and the Petrograd
workers had decided on insurrection, the Petrograd Soviet had overthrown the
Provisional Government, and thrust the coup d’etat upon the Congress of
Soviets. Now there was all great Russia to win—and then the world!”3 Later on,
however, we will see that Reed refocuses our attention on the Bolshevik party—
a splitoff from the old Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in which Lenin’s
faction had engaged in seemingly endless struggles with not only the more
moderate Mensheviks, but with a myriad of other currents as well.
“The comrades grouped around Lenin were far more seriously committed to
principles, which they wanted to see applied at all cost and pervading all
practical work,” as Lenin’s companion Nadezheda Krupskaya put it. She added
that “Ilyich could not stand this diffuse, unprincipled conciliationism,
conciliationism with anyone and everyone, which was tantamount to
surrendering one’s positions at the height of the struggle.” Instead, “the thing
was to have a united Party center, around which the Social-Democratic worker
masses could rally.” The final break—in which the Bolshevik party was
established as an independent entity—came at a 1912 conference “at which we
were able in a business-like manner to discuss questions relating to the work in
Russia and frame a clear line for this work.”4
It is here that Reed comes to focus his later comments:
Not by compromise with the propertied classes, or with the other political leaders; not by
conciliating the old Government mechanism, did the Bolsheviki conquer the power. Nor by the
organized violence of a small clique. If the masses all over Russia had not been ready for
insurrection, it must have failed. The only reason for Bolshevik success lay in their accomplishing
the vast and simple desires of the most profound strata of the people, calling them to the work of
tearing down and destroying the old, and afterward, in the smoke of the falling ruins, cooperating
with them to erect the framework of the new.5

The Bolshevik Mystique

The interplay of Lenin, the Bolshevik party, the broader Russian working-class
movement, and the insurgent masses of workers and peasants animates most
serious studies of the Russian Revolution. Those of us who have focused our
attention on such studies have been unable to avoid running into what might
almost be called the mystique of the Bolshevik party. N. N. Sukhanov, one of
Lenin’s Menshevik opponents in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(who acknowledged Lenin’s role as “a herald of the ideas of revolutionary
Marxism” and “the most authoritative leader of the Soviet proletarian Left”)
commented on what he called “characteristic traits of the Bolshevik ‘way of life’
and of specific methods of Bolshevik party work”—which he described
unsympathetically in these terms:
It became quite obvious that all Bolshevik work was held within the iron framework of a foreign
spiritual center [presumably Lenin’s ideas], without which the party workers would have felt
themselves to be completely helpless, which at the same time they felt proud of, and of which the
best amongst them felt themselves to be the devoted servitors, as knights were of the Holy Grail.6

A less knowledgeable and more sympathetic sense of this reality comes

through in the accounts of John Reed’s fellow left-wing journalist from the
United States, Albert Rhys Williams. Reed and Williams, along with Louise
Bryant and Bessie Beatty, found themselves traveling to Russia (before the
Bolshevik seizure of power) with a small cluster of returning Russian-American
revolutionaries, whom he described as “free, young, sturdy spirits,” but who
“were neither fools nor imbeciles. Knocking about the world had hammered all
of that out of them. Nor were these men hero-worshippers. The Bolshevik
movement was elemental and passionate, but it was scientific, realistic, and
uncongenial to hero-worship.” Nonetheless, as Williams later emphasized, their
attitude toward Lenin was that, “on the whole, they trusted him to use his subtle
and wide knowledge of Marxist theory, checked against his close knowledge of
people, and his genius as a tactician to know the moment when the people were
ready to seize power, and to lead the way.” In addition to this, Williams
emphasized other qualities—“their faith in the historic role of the workers, their
hardheaded reasoning, their compassion—[and] probably the most essential
ingredient: self-discipline. That, and their relentless optimism, a spirit of courage
and daring” Williams concluded. “Only with both could they have survived the
coming trials.”7
By 1919, the name of the Bolshevik party was changed from “Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks)” to the Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks). The shift from a party seeking the revolutionary overturn of the
state to a party holding state power would eventually give way to a fatal
transformation (as we shall explore shortly), but the early Communist movement
continued to adhere to the old Bolshevik ethos well into the 1920s. To this party,
according to Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky in their ABC of
Communism, “adhere the best of the workers and poorer peasants,” adding that
“all the interests which a party representing the interests of its class vigorously
pursues, constitute the party program,” and that “from our successes and failures,
from our mistakes and oversights, experience will be gained, not by ourselves
alone, but by the whole international proletariat.”8
 In his History of the Bolshevik Party, produced in 1923, Gregory Zinoviev
made much of the term “professional revolutionary” (a conceptualization often
expressed with the synonym “cadre”). “This term—‘professional
revolutionary’—played its part in the controversies between the Bolsheviks and
the Mensheviks,” Zinoviev wrote. Lenin’s argument was:
against us . . . there is Tsarist autocracy’s enormous force, its whole apparatus which it has created
over its 300 year term of office; against us are all the technical resources of the old Russia, its
schools and its press; yet we have a completely juvenile workers’ movement. If we want to force
the working masses together and to merge the separate little fires flaring up here and there into
one single big flame, then we need an exceptional, almost miraculous apparatus which is capable
of realizing all this. And for this it is no less necessary in turn that people really dedicated to the
working class are brought together by us into one organization of professional revolutionaries.9

Lenin himself had made the point in the 1900 essay “The Urgent Tasks of Our
Movement,” insisting, in the language of the classical Marxism permeating the
international socialist movement of that time, that the Russian working class
must “fulfill its great historical mission—to emancipate itself and the whole of
the Russian people from political and economic slavery.” But this would not
happen, he insisted, unless it produced “its political leaders, its prominent
representatives able to organize a movement and lead it.” He added that “the
Russian working class has already shown that it can produce such men and
women.” He concluded:
We must train people who will devote the whole of their lives, not only their spare evenings, to
the revolution; we must build up an organization large enough to permit the introduction of a
strict division of labor in the various forms of our work. . . . Social-Democracy does not tie its
hands, it does not restrict its activities to some one preconceived plan or method of political
struggle; it recognizes all methods of struggle, provided they correspond to the forces at the
disposal of the Party and facilitate the achievement of the best results. . . . Before us, in all its
strength, towers the enemy fortress which is raining shot and shell upon us, mowing down our
best fighters. We must capture this fortress, and we will capture it, if we unite all the forces of the
Russian revolutionaries into one party which will attract all that is vital and honest in Russia.10

In his profoundly important study of early Bolshevism, Lenin Rediscovered,

Lars Lih capably shows us that Lenin’s model was the German Social-
Democratic Party, which he sought to adapt to Russian realities while remaining
absolutely true to the revolutionary perspectives of Marx and Engels and (so he
thought) to the example of his German comrades. It can be argued, however, that
he unknowingly remained more completely and consistently true to Marxist
perspectives than did “the grand old man of German Social Democracy” August
Bebel and the “pope of Marxism” Karl Kautsky. The political trajectory of both
Bebel and Kautsky involved compromises with powerful nonrevolutionary
forces that increasingly weakened the revolutionary fiber of the German Social-
Democratic Party (and of the Socialist (or Second) International) in ways that
were not fully clear to Lenin until 1914.11
In a sense, then, there is truth to the 1926 observations of Max Eastman, a
close comrade of John Reed and Albert Rhys Williams, when he described
Lenin’s party in such terms as these, enhancing what I have called the Bolshevik
mystique:
It is an organization of a kind which never existed before. It combines certain essential features of
a political party, a professional association, a consecrated order, an army, a scientific society—and
yet it is in no sense a sect. Instead of cherishing in its membership a sectarian psychology, it
cherishes a certain relation to the predominant class forces of society as Marx defined them. And
this relation was determined by Lenin, and progressively readjusted by him, with a subtlety of
which Marx never dreamed.12

A problem with Eastman’s portrayal of Lenin as Heroic Individual is that it

loses an essential element of the Bolshevik party aptly captured in this
observation by the Indian Marxist scholar and revolutionary feminist Soma
Marik, who tells us that “the Bolshevik party that emerged by February 1917
was not a personal creation of Lenin. While he was its foremost theoretician, the
party was created by protracted interactions between practical workers and
theorists, and repeatedly remodeled.” She notes that “many ideas and
organizational concepts had to be modified and discarded under the pressure of
events and under class pressure.”13

Bolshevism and Its Opposite

Eastman also employed a somewhat dubious label in describing Lenin
—“engineer of revolution.” From here it would be a short conceptual step to
designating the Bolshevik or Communist Party as a collective “engineer of
revolution,” with humanity as the raw materials to be utilized in social
construction. And this relates to what happened in the 1930s: a murderous
collectivization of land and intensely exploitative super-industrialization, capped
by intensified authoritarian controls established over various realms of culture,
the redefinition of socialism to exclude freedom of expression and democracy,
the glorification of bureaucratic dictatorship, the personality cult of Stalin, the
increasingly fierce repression, the explosive expansion and brutalization of
forced labor camps, the infamous “purges” in which phony accusations and
torture and show trails led to innumerable executions.
All was done in the name of Communism, under the leadership of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, causing J. Arch Getty and Oleg V.
Naumov to entitle the important study they produced as The Road to Terror:
Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939. Regarding the
Communist leadership that saw itself as representing a continuation of Leninist
policy, Getty tells us: “In the worldview they had constructed, the future of
humanity depended on socialism. Socialism in turn depended on the survival of
the soviet revolutionary experience, which depended on keeping the Bolshevik
regime united, tightly disciplined, and in control of a society that frequently
exhibited hostility to that regime.” And yet, Getty acknowledges, something new
had been added to realities in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s.
“This ‘new situation,’ as the Stalinists called it, was the disastrous position in
which the Stalinist leadership found itself after the 1929–32 period of famine,
repression, and social upheaval that its collectivization and industrialization
policies had caused.”14
As Albert Rhys Williams noted late in life, these policies were described as
revolutionary in the 1939 party textbook History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, which told readers: “The distinguishing feature of this revolution
is that it was accomplished from above, on the initiative of the state.” Williams
responds: “It was a far cry from Lenin’s constant call for ‘initiative from below,’
in the much darker days of 1918.” More recently, Robert C. Tucker has
commented that “the implication was not, or not fully, understood at that time”
within the Communist Party, “so habituated was the collective party mind to the
idea that building socialism would be an evolutionary process.” Indeed, for
Lenin “the idea of the construction of socialism as a revolution from above
employing repressive means against large elements of the Revolution’s
constituency, especially in a terror-enforced collectivization against the
peasantry, never entered his mind.”15 This notorious “revolution from above”
flowed from another Stalinist commitment—that of building “socialism in one
country,” in sharp contradiction to the internationalist perspectives of Marx,
Lenin, the pre-1924 Bolshevik party, and the first four congresses of the
Communist International.
In fact, the dynamics and impact of this “revolution from above” contradicted
the party organizational principles that had been embraced in 1921 at the Third
Congress of the Communist International. Insisting that “the democratic
centralism of the Communist Party organization should be a real synthesis, a
fusion of centralism and proletarian democracy,” this resolution explicitly
warned against a division in the party between “the active functionaries and the
passive masses” and against “formal or mechanical centralization [which] would
mean the centralization of ‘power’ in the hands of the Party bureaucracy,
allowing it to dominate the other members of the Party or the revolutionary
proletarian masses which are outside the Party.”16

Seeds of Stalinism
There were elements in the Bolshevik experience under Lenin, however, that
could be said to contain seeds of what came to be known as Stalinism. The
wonderful quality of Lenin’s Marxism, especially between 1915 and 1917, was
the unity of revolutionary strategy and revolutionary goal—each permeated by a
vibrant, uncompromising working-class militancy, insurgent spirit, and radical
democracy. This is worthy of the great symphonies of narrative and analysis that
the finest representatives of the revolutionary Marxist tradition have
produced. This was Lenin’s triumph, culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution.17
Lenin’s tragedy is that this broke down in practice in 1918—not simply
because of the debilitating and murderous violence, but because the simple
solution of “workers’ democracy” became problematical when the abstract
visions were brought down to the level of concrete realities. Workers’
committees and councils in the factories and neighborhoods did not have enough
information and knowledge to form practical decisions nor enough skill and
practical experience to carry out decisions for the purpose of running a national
economy, developing adequate social services throughout the country,
formulating a coherent foreign policy, or running a factory. This was especially
so in the context of the overwhelming destructiveness of World War I, the
various and unrelenting foreign military interventions against the revolution, the
economic blockade, and the horrors of the civil war.18
And in that context the rights of speech, press, assembly, and association—
providing the possibility of spreading confusion, or putting forward super-
revolutionary but unworkable alternatives, or fomenting counterrevolution—
could not be tolerated. This meant the suppression of Mensheviks, anarchists,
Left Socialist Revolutionaries, Right Socialist Revolutionaries, liberals, priests,
and others. Only the dictatorship of the Communist Party could be tolerated; so
Lenin was insisting by 1919.
In some ways, this reflected a powerful element of truth in the situation—but
led to terrible contradictions, inevitably to abuses and crimes and corruption. A
one-time ally of the Bolsheviks, the great Left Socialist Revolutionary leader
Maria Spiridonova, wrote an open letter from a Bolshevik prison giving some
sense of this moral disaster. “Your party had great tasks and began them finely,”
she recalled. “The October Revolution, in which we marched side by side, was
bound to conquer, because its foundations and watchwords were rooted in
historical reality and were solidly supported by all the working masses.” But by
November 1918 this had all changed: “In the name of the proletariat you have
wiped out all the moral achievements of our Revolution. Things that cry aloud to
Heaven have been done by the provincial Chekas, by the All-Russian Cheka. A
blood-thirsty mockery of the souls and bodies of men, torture and treachery, and
then—murder, murder without end, done without inquiry, on denunciation only,
without waiting for any proof of guilt.”19
This was acknowledged even by partisans of the Bolshevik cause, even as
they defended the Bolsheviks. For example, Albert Rhys Williams wrote this in
his 1921 classic Through the Russian Revolution:
“Repressions, tyranny, violence,” cry the enemies. “They have abolished free speech, free press,
free assembly. They have imposed drastic military conscription and compulsory labor. They have
been incompetent in government, inefficient in industry. They have subordinated the Soviets to
the Communist Party. They have lowered their Communist ideals, changed and shifted their
program and compromised with the capitalists.”
Some of these charges are exaggerated. Many can be explained. But they cannot all be
explained away. Friends of the Soviet grieve over them. Their enemies have summoned the world
to shudder and protest against them. . . .
While abroad hatred against the Bolsheviks as the new “enemies of civilization” mounted from
day to day, these selfsame Bolsheviks were straining to rescue civilization in Russia from total
collapse.20

Victor Serge later recalled:

“Totalitarianism” did not yet exist as a word; as an actuality it began to press hard on us, even
without our being aware of it. . . . What with the political monopoly, the Cheka, and the Red
Army, all that now existed of the “Commune-State” of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The
war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a
bureaucratic rationing-apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive and when?
The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority could give
the day to reaction.21

Leninism versus Stalinism

Lenin had always believed that although “the Party, as the vanguard of the
working class, must not be confused . . . with the entire class,” it was the case
that a “varied, rich, fruitful” interrelationship with the working class as a whole
must be facilitated by “the full application of the democratic principle in the
Party organization.” This meant that the organization should function according
to “the principles of democratic centralism.” The unity and cohesion of the party
must be permeated with “guarantees for the rights of all minorities and for all
loyal opposition . . . the autonomy of every [local] Party organization . . .
recognizing that all Party functionaries must be elected and subject to recall,”
and that “there must be wide and free discussion of Party questions, free
comradely criticism and assessments of events in Party life.” This would help
the proletarian vanguard to link up “and—if you wish—merge, in a certain
measure, with the broadest masses of working people,” but (as Lenin explained
in 1920) only through prolonged effort and hard-won experience that would be
“facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory which . . . is not a dogma but
assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly
mass and truly revolutionary movement.”22
In 1923, Leon Trotsky put forward the image of “Bolshevik” that was
consistent with Williams’s observations, the 1921 Comintern resolution, and
Lenin’s writings. He was employing it, however, as an argument against
bureaucratic-conservative trends within the now-ruling organization. “A
Bolshevik is not merely a disciplined person; he is a person who in each case
and on each question forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it
courageously and independently, not only against his enemies but inside his own
party. Today, perhaps, he will be in the minority in his organization. He will
submit, because it is his party. But this does not always signify that he is in the
wrong.” And if he is right, by persistently raising his differences, “he will render
his party a service.” What the party needs is not “sycophantic functionaries” but
people “who are strongly tempered morally, permeated with a feeling of personal
responsibility.” He emphasized: “What is needed is criticism, checking of fact,
independence of thought, independence of character, the feeling of
responsibility, truth toward oneself and toward one’s work.”23
 The comments of Lenin and Trotsky are also consistent with the illuminating
description of the Bolshevik Party of 1917 by Victor Serge, who strikingly
asserted that “the party is the nervous system of the working class, its brain.” Of
course, the nervous system— extending throughout the body—carries messages
back and forth and to and from the brain. The members of the revolutionary
party, Serge tells us, “have to uncover, by scientific analysis of historic
processes, the tendency of events and the possibilities that are open in them.”
More than this, just as the nervous system carries sensations and information
throughout one’s body, while interacting with our central intelligence, the party
comrades “have to grasp the action that is possible and necessary for the
proletariat, according with historical necessity and not with its wish or hope of
the moment. In a word, they must see reality, grasp possibility, and conceive the
action which will be the link between the real and the possible.” The measure for
what is to be done is “the proletariat’s own higher interests.” Serge puts it all
together like this:
The October Revolution offers us an almost perfect model of the proletarian party. Relatively few
as they may be, its militants live with the masses and among them. Long and testing years—a
revolution [in 1905], then illegality, exile, prison, endless ideological battles—have given it
excellent activists and real leaders, whose parallel thinking was strengthened in collective action.
Personal initiative and the panache of strong personalities were balanced by intelligent
centralization, voluntary discipline and respect for recognized mentors. Despite the efficiency of
its organizational apparatus, the party suffered not the slightest bureaucratic deformation. No
fetishism of organizational norms can be observed in it; it is free of decadent and even of dubious
traditions; its dominant tradition is that of the war against opportunism—it is revolutionary down
to the marrow of its bones.24

What Serge offers here is consistent with the descriptions offered by Williams
and Reed and Krupskaya, and with the writings of Lenin and Trotsky. It has little
in common with the ideological description by J. Arch Getty of the so-called
Bolsheviks who purportedly “self-destructed” in the 1930s. “The Bolshevik
Party was a product of idealistic, egalitarian, and socially progressive strands in
the Russian intelligentsia and working class,” Getty acknowledges. “By the
1930s much of the original idealism had been lost or transformed, as Bolshevik
revolutionaries became state officials.”25
 Not all of the Bolsheviks were corrupted in the way that Getty suggests. Of
course, some were. In 1932, Trotsky wrote from exile: “On the foundation of the
dictatorship of the proletariat—in a backward country, surrounded by capitalists
—for the first time a powerful bureaucratic apparatus has been created from
among the upper layers of the workers, that is, raised above the masses, that lays
down the law to them, that has at its disposal colossal resources, that is bound
together by an inner mutual responsibility, and that intrudes into the policies of a
workers’ government its own interests, methods, and regulations.” Trotsky was
merciless in describing the ex-working-class functionary: “He eats and guzzles
and procreates and grows himself a respectable potbelly. He lays down the law
with a sonorous voice, handpicks from below people faithful to him, remains
faithful to his superiors, prohibits others from criticizing himself, and sees in all
of this the gist of the general line.”26
In the same period, a dissident Communist in Soviet Russia, Martemyan N.
Riutin, was complaining that “Stalin is killing Leninism, [killing] the proletarian
revolution under the flag of the proletarian revolution, [killing] socialist
construction under the flag of socialist construction.” A one-time leader of the
Communist Party in Moscow, expelled in 1930 for opposing the forced
collectivization of land, Riutin wrote that “the most evil enemy of the party and
the proletarian dictatorship, the most evil counterrevolutionary and provocateur
could not have carried out the work of destroying the party and socialist
construction better than Stalin has done,” adding that “the main cohort of
Lenin’s comrades has been removed from the leading positions, and some of
them are in prisons and exile; others have capitulated, still others, demoralized
and humiliated, carry on a miserable existence, and finally, some, those who
have degenerated completely, have turned into loyal servants of the dictator.”27
The dilemma of a regime founded in the spirit of socialist democracy
evolving as a bureaucratic dictatorship, as Lenin himself recognized, could only
be resolved by revolution bringing more advanced industrial countries into the
socialist orbit, creating a material basis for the economic and cultural
development of a socialist society. As the spread of socialist revolutions was
blocked, however, the growing contradictions overwhelmed revolutionary
Russia. Moshe Lewin has commented that “the year 1924 [marks] the end of
‘Bolshevism,’” adding:
For a few more years one group of old Bolsheviks after another was to engage in rearguard
actions in an attempt to rectify the course of events in one fashion or another. But their political
tradition and organization, rooted in the history of Russian and European Social-Democracy, were
rapidly swept aside by the mass of new members and new organizational structures which pressed
that formation into an entirely different mold. The process of the party’s conversion into an
apparatus—careers, discipline, ranks, abolition of all political rights—was an absolute scandal for
the oppositions of 1924–28.28

But these scandalized dissident Communists were swept aside and savagely
repressed by what Michal Reiman has aptly described as “a ruling social
stratum, separated from the people and hostilely disposed toward it,” even (I
would add) as this stratum claimed to speak in the name of the people and with
the rhetoric of Marx and Lenin.29

The Saving Remnant

Among Communists in the Soviet Union it is certainly the case that there were
also those who, while adapting to the Stalinist atmosphere, neither became
utterly corrupted nor abandoned completely their earlier ideals and Leninist
inclinations. (The fate of some of these people has been recounted in such
dissident Soviet/post-Soviet scholars as Roy Medvedev and Vadim Rogovin, and
also in the brilliant contribution of US historian Wendy Z. Goldman.30) The
same was true within the international Communist movement. As Marxist theory
and revolutionary organizational perspectives became increasingly compromised
and debased, there were some—including in the leaderships of certain
Communist parties—who for a time were able to remain true to their original
perspectives through the 1920s. For a short while, such figures as M. N. Roy in
India, James P. Cannon in the United States, Chen Duxiu in China, Antonio
Gramsci in Italy, and Georg Lukács in Hungary continued to do important
political work. Gramsci and Lukács provided theorizations of their work that
stand as particularly influential intellectual and cultural contributions—and are
nothing if not vital expressions of Leninist perspectives.
Among Marxists influenced by Leninism but incapable of embracing Stalin’s
version of Marxism, some returned to the left-wing of the Social Democracy (the
Second International), some handfuls joined with Trotsky to form the Fourth
International (seeking to develop what Trotsky called a “Bolshevik-Leninist”
alternative to Stalinism), some abandoned any pretense of revolutionary politics,
and some continued to engage with Marxist ideas while drifting more or less
away from political activism. Among those Europeans in this last category there
developed something that took the label of “Western Marxism.” This often
involved rich studies in philosophical, sociological, and historical matters, with
analyses of and in a variety of issues having to do with culture and
consciousness. By the late twentieth century, many intellectuals and academics
were inclined to counterpose such Western Marxism to the perspectives not only
of Stalin but also of Lenin (often arguing that the latter had been responsible for
the former). But Western Marxism’s foundational figures happen to be two
highly sophisticated and unrepentant Leninists—Lukács and Gramsci—who
wrote their most influential works as they sought to build and give leadership to
the Communist parties in their native lands. These writings involve sustained
efforts to utilize Lenin’s revolutionary political thought in order to carry out
tasks of party-building and revolutionary strategy.31
Even now, after the much-celebrated “collapse of Communism,” it seems
possible—given the way the world is going—that these critical Bolshevik and
Leninist traditions will continue to attract, and be developed by, revolutionary
activists of today and tomorrow.32 Especially to the extent that they are able to
make such traditions relevant in actual protests and political action, it is likely
that scholarly debate will swirl around the issue of Lenin and revolutionary
democracy.
Chapter Six
THE GREAT LENIN DEBATE OF 2012

The deepening of global crises, the intensification of popular protest and

insurgency, and the spread of revolutionary possibilities have been generating
renewed interest in Marxism and, along with that, a renewal of Marxism. A key
figure in the Marxist tradition—and in the renewal—is the person who was
central in the first revolution to be led by revolutionary Marxists: Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin. For those who are serious about Marxism, about challenging capitalism,
and about revolutionary change, Lenin is a key figure who must be engaged
with. Wrestling with and learning from the actual ideas and experience
associated with Lenin has become a priority for a significant and growing
minority of scholars and activists.1
Not surprisingly, efforts to get all of this right have generated different ways
of understanding what happened in history and (for some of us) how this can be
usefully applied to our own present-day realities and future efforts. One of the
most recent controversies, in which I have become involved—at one point,
tongue in cheek, I referred to it as the “Lenin wars”—was initiated by a young
activist in the United States named Pham Binh.2 Pham, a former member of the
International Socialist Organization (ISO), who left it a few years before I joined
it, attacked the late Tony Cliff (a significant figure in the ISO tradition) for
writing, a quarter of a century back, a massive political biography of Lenin
whose purpose was, in part, to serve as a guide in the building of the British
Socialist Workers Party and its international affiliates. Cliff created a historically
inaccurate conceptualization of Lenin, Pham tells us, in order to advance his own
particular political agenda. Advancing his own political agenda is something that
Pham himself is “guilty” of, the purpose of his polemic being to advance his
own particular views about the Occupy movement and the tasks of socialists in
the United States. (There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with that.) His
modest contribution makes use of a few Lenin quotes and of the excellent work
of Lars Lih, a serious historian and Lenin scholar.3
Lars and I were both drawn into this debate—initially on opposite sides. In
the course of our debate, however, there have been fruitful convergences,
although certain distinctions and differences remain in our interpretations of the
historical material—yet there is between us, I feel, a mutual respect and an
openness, related to the fact that we more or less share a common methodology.
What I want to do here is, first of all, to indicate what that methodology is. Then
I want to map out the two areas in which Lars and I have disagreed—a 1905
debate among the Bolsheviks and the meaning of the 1912 Prague “All-Russia
Conference” of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). I will
indicate my own understanding of where things stand now in that dispute,
offering my own take on the historical actualities. Finally, I will give some
attention to the lessons—and also the non-lessons—for our own time of issues
related to this controversy, and also related issues that go beyond these particular
“Lenin wars.”

Methodology for Historians and Marxists

A starting point for our understanding of historical methodology is grasping the
fact that the word “history” has two basic meanings. As my good friend
Wikipedia puts it: “History is the discovery, collection, organization, and
presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period
of time after writing was invented.” I would rephrase that to say that history is,
first of all, all the stuff that happened in the past (in a sense, up to this very
moment, which has itself just passed into history). But history is also a
discipline, the study of the past. Sometimes this second meaning of history is
called historiography, which Wikipedia tells us refers “either to the study of
history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical
work on a specialized topic”—for example, Lenin and the Bolshevik party. In a
moment I want to talk a bit more about the methodology of history as a
discipline, but first I want to touch on the connection of history and politics.
A starting point for me is to focus on the contributions of Marxism to
historiography. A central aspect of Marxism is what has been called the
materialist conception of history, or historical materialism, which has had a
powerful impact on the discipline of history, just as it has had on so many other
intellectual disciplines. There have naturally been raging controversies over how
to understand historical materialism and how to use it. I will restrict myself here
to summarizing some of how I understand it and use it. If we want to understand
human beings, a key thing we need to grasp is how they sustain themselves—the
activities and relationships they enter into, and the resources they use, to get the
things that they need (such as food, clothing, shelter) and the things that they
want. That is, we must look at economics. Because of its centrality to the human
condition and to the lived experience of us all, economics is a key to the shaping
of human culture and consciousness and institutions. For at least the past five
thousand years, there has been sufficient economic surplus in increasing areas of
the world to allow for economic inequality, with powerful minorities enriching
themselves through exploiting laboring majorities—and history is shaped in
large measure by these social-economic classes, and the tensions and conflicts
and struggles that inevitably arise between them. History is a dynamic totality of
contradictory and interacting factors, moved forward by conflicting and evolving
potentialities inherent within it—which has led to the rise and decline of
different forms of economy, and these different economic systems can be utilized
to develop a coherent understanding of the actual shape of history over the
centuries. All of these notions have become truisms in the discipline of history.
But there is a key element of Marxism that is more controversial—the
unbreakable link between the study of history and the commitment to

4
revolutionary politics.4
Although some historians are not inclined to admit it, even to themselves,
there is always an interplay of politics and historiography. If you are a liberal or
a conservative or an anarchist or a fascist or a socialist or a racist or a misogynist
or an egalitarian or whatever (and some political notions seep into the thinking
of even those who see themselves as apolitical), that will influence the way you
interpret and study and write history. It influences the questions you ask, the
answers you seek, the way you interpret the data you find as you explore
historical questions. Marx and those who have embraced his orientation are clear
and upfront—they seek an understanding of history in order to help change the
world in the interest of the exploited and the oppressed, seeking a future without
exploitation and oppression. This shapes the way they study and interpret history
—and there is nothing wrong with that, especially if they are conscious and
honest about it.
At this point, however, it may be fruitful to make a distinction between
serious politics and what many of us have labeled sectarian politics. Serious
politics seeks to engage with the world as it really is, and with the potentialities
for change that are really there. If it is revolutionary politics, it seeks to connect
with the actual lives and consciousness and struggles of the exploited and the
oppressed in a manner that can have real impact, bringing into being
consciousness and struggles that can positively change lives and create the
possibility of an actual revolution. If it is sectarian politics, while the stated
purpose may be the same, the actual purpose is to sustain a particular universe
that is separate from the actual, real-world lives and consciousness and struggles
of those inhabiting the larger society. The primary purpose is to validate and
sustain the centrality and importance of one’s particular organization and ideas
and specialness. This approach to politics often spills over into one’s approach to
history—a lack of seriousness, the creation of historical narratives on the basis
of fragments grabbed from one or another source, but not fully understood, in
order to make a particular sectarian point, to validate your own particular notion
or argument about what you believe should be done. References to history are
utilitarian—an actual immersion in historical sources and interpretations tends to
be dismissed as adventures in esoterica, the primary point being to create a sense
of historical authority for what we should do—or say—today or tomorrow. This
is not good historiography.
For serious Marxist historians, I think it is helpful to have a sense of the
integrity of the discipline of history and also a keen sense of what I would call
“the activist disadvantage and the activist advantage.” I want to connect this to
similar and different qualities that I believe can be found in the approach of Lars
Lih and myself. Some of the similarities can be found in our approach to the
integrity of the discipline.5
A serious historian first of all needs to listen to others. This involves having
some familiarity with what other historians have to say (that is, secondary
sources) and also with what the actual people you are studying have to say
(which refers to what we call primary sources). It is important to be able to give
a sympathetic reading to what is being said (that is, trying to understand, really
and truly, what the person says and means) but also to give it a critical reading
(which means considering possible internal contradictions in what is being said
and also contradictions between a secondary source and a primary source, or
contradictions between one primary source and another). The right kind of
listening also involves the insight that someone, whether an historian or a
historical participant, may be wrong about many important things but still get
some things right.
Related to all of this, a historian needs to reach for coherence, understanding
that history is not simply a jumble of interesting or contradictory or annoying
facts, or one damn thing after another. What are the meanings, the causes that
bring about certain effects that themselves cause new effects? Where do the
ever-present contradictions come from, and how do the contradictions fit
together into a coherent whole and explain what happened next? At the same
time, it is helpful to hungrily seek things that will challenge the coherence.
Sometimes, something that seems to contradict your coherent narrative helps to
illuminate something “new” that needs to be grasped in order to get the story
right. If you take a shortcut to dismiss it or pigeonhole it, you may create a false
coherence that distorts the reality.
The secondary sources (that is, the accounts written by historians) that are
best are those that utilize and do justice to the primary sources (materials from
the period under study—including documents, journals and journalism,
recollections from participants, and so on). This raises the question of how one
uses primary sources. I have already touched on that, but there is more to be
said. For any serious assertion, it is best to have more than one reference point in
the pool of historical material, with at least some contextualization of primary
texts. Just because Lenin writes something, for example, does not by itself clinch
anything. What was the purpose and what was the context of the document, how
does it correspond with other documents by Lenin, how does it correspond to
what others were saying at the time, and how does it correspond with
retrospective overviews provided by other participants? (Of course, latter-day
recollections of participants need to be correlated with documents from the time
—the mind can play tricks, and memories are not always reliable.)
Understanding how such things fit together helps us understand the actual
meaning of the particular Lenin quote. In all of this, it is important, as already
suggested, to reach for coherence but also to reach for complexity.
Given the kind of complexity involved here, it is important to understand that
history is necessarily a collective enterprise. Various historians who immerse
themselves in the historical material may provide useful information and
interesting interpretations, but they will inevitably get some of it wrong. Others
delving into the material and weighing in on what they found and how they
understand it all come up with new insights and mistakes, which may be
challenged (providing corrections and newer insights, sometimes with mistakes)
by someone else. Some aspects of this collective enterprise may result in
academic dead-ends, or the collective building up of ideological dogmas (more
often than not buttressing the status quo). But some of it results in the collective
accumulation of more information, more insights, more understanding of what
happened in history.

The Activist Approach: Advantages and

Disadvantages
Before turning to the examination of Bolshevism in 1905 and 1912, I want to
take a few moments to consider what I have referred to as “the activist advantage
and the activist disadvantage.” Lars Lih’s marvelous book Lenin Rediscovered
primarily sets out to demolish what he refers to as “the textbook” account of
Lenin initiated by Cold War anticommunists. But he also advances, secondarily,
a critique of Tony Cliff, John Molyneux, and me (lumping us together despite
our differences). In this, he correctly notes that we are political activists, and
sometimes refers to us as the activist historians. It seems to me that there are
both advantages and disadvantages in such activism for one who is seeking to
write about the history of Bolshevism. An obvious advantage is that we
passionately care about the history and know something about it (for example,
we are actually inclined to read Lenin seriously), and we also are absolutely
unsympathetic to the project of the Cold War anticommunists—all of which puts
us in the same camp as Lars himself. The additional advantage we have is an
intimate, inside knowledge (which Lars cannot have) of the pull-and-tug and
swirl of revolutionary politics and of organizational dynamics. Sometimes this
can provide insights and clues, an “insider’s” familiarity with the practical
meaning that certain theoretical texts may possess.
The activist disadvantage seems to me to have two aspects. I want to take
some time on the first before moving on to the second. There is a very natural
tendency—which I have already noted—to connect the history with what we
perceive as the present-day requirements of our own political activity and
projects, and this can all too often result in shortcuts and distortions in the way
we interpret the history—reading the present into the past in ways that distort
what actually happened in the past. Left-wing activists are not the only historians
who do this, but it is certainly a temptation and occupational hazard for us.
I think, on the other hand, that there is a strength in this aspect of the “activist
disadvantage” that I am criticizing. There is a desire, on our part, to ground our
perspectives and activities in what actually happened in history, and to give
people—our own comrades and others—a sense of what happened in history as
part of a left-wing political education and the development of a socialist class
consciousness. There are popularized accounts of history that are consequently
developed and shared, in some cases broad overviews such as A. L. Morton’s A
People’s History of England, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United
States, Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World, Leo Huberman’s Man’s
Worldly Goods, Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution, Peter
Fryer’s Staying Power, my own Short History of the U.S. Working Class, and so
on. There are also popularized works on the Bolsheviks and the Russian
Revolution, the history of May Day, Marxism, and so on. Whatever their
limitations or weaknesses, Tony Cliff’s multivolume works on Lenin and
Trotsky fit into this category, as do a number of popular pamphlets and short
books produced by various left-wing organizations. These serve a positive
function of providing an entry point for larger numbers of people—activists,
workers, students, and others—to an initial understanding of what happened in
history and how this might connect to the struggles of today and tomorrow.
Related to such work, however, is the second activist disadvantage: a
tendency on our part to settle into a basic, overarching historical narrative—
consistent with the traditions in which our organizations are rooted—which we
do not question, and which sometimes closes us off from seeking new insights
into what actually happened in history. This is in contrast to a historian like Lars
Lih. In one of my polemics, I shared my appreciation for Lars by noting that “he
is a scholar of considerable integrity, in my opinion, whose work is greatly
enhanced by the fact that he is fluent in Russian and has an incredibly fine mind
and delicious wit and iconoclastic bent, facilitating a fruitfully critical-minded
approach to the study of Lenin.” I would repeat the critical side of this too:
“being an iconoclast with integrity does not mean that one is inevitably right
when he smashes some presumably ‘iconic’ interpretation of what happened in
history.” Sometimes he can overstate his case (which enhances the drama of
smashing the particular icon), and sometimes even he can get something wrong.
But unencumbered by the “activist disadvantage,” Lars has been feeding
invaluable and challenging contributions into the collective enterprise of
comprehending what actually happened in the history of Bolshevism.

Creating Bolshevism
The recent disagreements between Lars and me have involved two issues: the
meaning of a debate that arose among the Bolsheviks at a conference in April
1905, and whether the Bolsheviks became a distinct party as a result of a
conference in Prague in January 1912. It seems to me Lars has two primary
concerns here. One is to defend his interpretation of Lenin’s pamphlet What Is to
Be Done? as a document that is absolutely consistent with the revolutionary-
democratic essence of Marxism and that is profoundly optimistic about the
capacity of the working class to make a revolution. (I agree with his
interpretation.) His other concern related to this is that Lenin’s conception of the
revolutionary party has nothing to do with the conspiratorial elitism attributed to
him by the “textbook interpretation” but was actually the conception agreed
upon by most Marxists throughout the world at that time, including the German
Social Democrats grouped around August Bebel and Karl Kautsky. (I basically
agree with this too.) Others in the debate have sought the authority of Lars’s
work with a somewhat broader concern in mind—to establish historical-Leninist
authority in support of projects involving some variety of socialist unity. If
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were part of the same organization, and if Lenin
thought this was fine (as a good Social Democrat embracing—as did the
Mensheviks—the orientation of Karl Kautsky), then obviously we should go and
do likewise, rejecting the project of building distinctly “Leninist” organizations.
Lars has no position on this—he is focused on what actually happened in history.
It seems to me that the dispute between Lars and me has narrowed
dramatically on both questions of 1905 and 1912. I will first try to sum up where
things stand on the first controversy in a manner that I think Lars might agree
with.
In April 1905 at a Bolshevik conference a dispute opened up with Lenin on
one side; and on the other stood some practical Bolshevik activists, who were
known as committeemen, operating in underground conditions inside Russia.
The debate seems to have involved the question of how open the revolutionary
party now could and should be, particularly related to the question of bringing
more workers onto the party’s revolutionary committees in the midst of the 1905
workers’ insurgency.
A Belgian historian named Marcel Liebman, in his book Leninism under
Lenin, argued that this was part of a larger pattern of Lenin’s history—swinging
from authoritarian-elitist inclinations (reflected, for example, in What Is to Be
Done?) to revolutionary-democratic inclinations (reflected in the dispute with
his rigid committeemen comrades). Following this interpretation, Tony Cliff
argued that the committeemen wanted to adhere to the undemocratic ideas in
What Is to Be Done? while Lenin wanted to abandon those ideas. It seems clear,
however, that the Liebman-Cliff interpretation of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet is
wrong—and that their interpretation of the 1905 debate is therefore seriously
flawed.
In my writings I have emphasized the importance of the debate and suggested
(following accounts by Nadezhda Krupskaya, and others) that Lenin was right in
opposing a sectarian tendency among the Bolshevik committeemen. Lars was
inclined to see this as giving support to the Cliff misinterpretation, and even to
see my position as a hostile attack on the Bolshevik praktiki (and he scoffed at a
presumed “Lenin versus the Bolsheviks” scenario). It seemed to me, on the other
hand, that Lars was intent on denying the existence of a debate that actually
happened. Fortunately, the discussion moved past this unproductive wrangle.
It is clear that there was a sharp debate in 1905—with Lenin and some
Bolshevik comrades on one side and with a number of Bolshevik committeemen
on the other—over the question of creating greater openness and worker
involvement in the Bolshevik organization inside Russia, and Lenin lost the vote
on this question. There are documents from the April conference themselves that
show this to be true, and also two “inside accounts” in English—one by
Solomon Schwarz, who was a Bolshevik at that time but later became a
Menshevik, and another by Lenin’s companion and close comrade Nadezhda
Krupskaya. Schwarz’s conclusions are designed to demonstrate dogmatic,
sectarian qualities in Bolshevism that even Lenin was uneasy about, while
Krupskaya’s conclusion was that these were growing pains in Bolshevism that
eventually were overcome in part through Lenin’s efforts—but both tell basically
the same story, which is critical of the triumphant committeemen. The question
remains, who was right—Lenin or the committeemen (a leading spokesman of
that time, according to Lars, being Lev Kamenev). Until proof is offered
otherwise, I am inclined to trust Krupskaya’s account, with its assumption that
Lenin was right. At one point in our debate, Lars leaned toward Kamenev and
the committeemen as having a firmer grip on the Russian realities. It’s a
tantalizing question—and only someone like Lars, who is fluent in Russian, can
help us to come closer to a resolution of that question.6
Lars Lih is in the forefront of those rejecting the Stalinist notion—propagated
in the 1930s (and later embraced by Cold War anticommunists)—that as early as
1902 Lenin set out to establish a “party of a new type” (one that would be
qualitatively different from the old Social-Democratic model). At long last this
party of a new type came into being, according to that interpretation, with the
formal split from the Mensheviks in 1912. More than simply rejecting this
notion, Lars, with an iconoclastic flourish, announced in a 2012 polemic that he
was revising his own judgment, as presented in his excellent short biography
Lenin, published one year earlier, and siding with Pham Binh’s rejection of (as
Pham put it) “the myth that the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks separated into two
parties in 1912.” Actually, the formulation that Lars advanced was more
restrained. He says: “Lenin and the Bolsheviks did not set out to organize their
faction as a separate party, they vehemently denied that they had done so after
the Conference, and they were justified in making this denial.”
After a substantial interchange, which included my lengthy and fully
documented article entitled “The Birth of the Bolshevik Party in 1912,” Lars
offered the following judgment, which seems to me to reflect a convergence in
our views:
Recently Paul Le Blanc has written a long and instructive essay on the Prague conference which
concludes that “for all practical purposes, the party that emerged from the Prague All-Russian
RSDLP conference of 1912 was a Bolshevik party.” The key words here are “for all practical
purposes.” Paul points to a number of reasons for equating Bolshevism and the party: the new
central committee was composed overwhelmingly of Bolsheviks; the Bolshevik effort to forge a
coalition with “party Mensheviks” never amounted to much; the other factions did not
acknowledge the legitimacy of the central institutions voted in by the Prague conference and they
tried (not very successfully) to set up competing institutions; there is direct organisational
continuity between the 1912 central committee and the Communist Party of 1918 that added
‘Bolshevik’ to its official name. All this is true, but in no way clashes with my earlier statement
about the outlook and aims of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1912.7

As Lars goes on to say, there remain a number of unresolved issues. One of

them he identifies in this way: “I believe that Paul does not sufficiently allow for
the possibility that the Bolshevik outlook in 1912 cannot be directly deduced
from what turned out to be, ‘for all practical purposes,’ the actual outcome.” I
think that is an important question, and I think it is even more complicated than
what Lars indicates. What did Lenin say in certain polemics and how do some of
his formulations compare to what he actually thought (to the extent that this can
be determined from correspondence and other documents) is another question.
Yet another involves the possibility—probably the inevitability—that what Lenin
believed and what some of his Bolshevik comrades believed and said might not
be quite the same.
No definitive answers can be provided here, but there are a few things that
can be said about the work remaining to be done. To answer these and other
questions, it is necessary to give serious attention to what went before, and this
in two different ways.
One factor to consider is that the April 1905 Bolshevik conference referred to
earlier was actually the Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party. But only the Bolsheviks attended; the Mensheviks boycotted. Christopher
Read, in his 2005 biography of Lenin puts it this way:
It was thus not entirely Lenin’s fault that when the Third Congress convened in London on 25
April 1905 all the delegates were Leninists. Lenin used the congress . . . to establish a Leninist
grip on key Party institutions. Existing papers—Iskra and Vpered—were declared disbanded, and
a new paper, Proletarii, set up as the official Party newspaper under Lenin’s editorship. An all-
Leninist Central Committee was elected. . . . Lenin even wrote to the International Socialist
Bureau in Brussels in June demanding it recognize Proletarii as the only official newspaper and
derecognize Iskra.8

In this situation, of course, Lenin was not inclined to completely and

definitively split from the Mensheviks, and there were soon efforts—partially
successful amidst the revolutionary turmoil of 1905—to heal the breach. The
point is, however, that in 1912 we see a very similar scenario, but Lenin and
others had already had this previous experience under their belts and had seen
how “unity” turned out in the years following 1905. There were growing
frustrations with the growth of liquidationism (abandonment of the revolutionary
underground) among a large sector of the Mensheviks, combined with the
toleration of and the adaptation toward liquidationism among another large
sector of Mensheviks, the passage and flouting of anti-liquidator resolutions,
ongoing Menshevik hostility toward the Bolsheviks, and the relative paralysis of
the RSDLP.
By 1911 Kamenev and Lenin collaborated in producing the intransigent
polemic The Two Parties and the Leninist Bolsheviks were committed to
organizing an RSDLP conference in Prague—in a manner similar to what
happened in April 1905. With a difference—this time there was an intention to
exclude the majority of Mensheviks, and also the anticipation that there might
well be a boycott by others. It is interesting to note the take on the situation
according to Rosa Luxemburg, speaking for the Social Democratic Party of the
Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, in the autumn of 1911. By this time,
Luxemburg was much closer to Lenin and the Bolsheviks than had been the case
six years earlier—but she was alarmed with the practical possibility that two
parties would actually be created out of the RSDLP. “In view of the cynical
excesses of the factional entities that side with the Liquidators Martov, Dan and
Company,” she wrote, “Lenin and his friends began to address the question of
convening a Party Conference that would exclude the Golos tendency [that is,
Martov, Dan and company],” adding that “in the political estimation of the
Mensheviks, there are no significant differences between our tendency and
Lenin’s.”
This agreement is evident in how Luxemburg described the internal situation
in the non-Bolshevik sectors of the RSDLP: “The orgies of opportunism of the
‘Mensheviks’ and their open support of the Liquidators led . . . to the split in the
heart of their own faction and to the secession of the ‘party Mensheviks,’ led by
Georgi Plekhanov.” While respectful of the party-Mensheviks, Luxemburg was
as scornful as Lenin was toward the ultraleft Bolsheviks—the Forwardists—
associated with Bogdanov, and also toward Trotsky’s “anti-faction” faction. But
she was concerned that the Bolsheviks, in “wanting to form a bloc only with the
‘party-Mensheviks,’” were adopting what she considered a destructive effort to
shut out the Mensheviks grouped around Martov and Dan and also the smaller
groups. “This stubborn Bolshevik war against all other groups even had the
result,” she noted, “that Plekhanov’s group also, made fearful by the isolation of
the Leninist faction, definitively backed out from an alliance that Lenin saw as
the only possibility.”9
The Prague conference of 1912 did not declare the existence of a new
Bolshevik Party. It declared the reorganization and renewal of the RSDLP—but
one as much under Bolshevik control as had been the case in 1905. Except now
there were no efforts to backtrack in the interests of unity. As Lars Lih indicates,
the formal position of Lenin and his comrades was that this version of the
RSDLP would not simply and exclusively be the Bolsheviks. And I think Lars is
correct when he says Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades were, “not propagating
a ‘new type of party,’ as later Stalinist historians had it. They were propagating
the party principle as it had always been understood in the Second
International.”10 Their goal was an organization conforming to an idealized
notion of the German Social Democratic Party, one that did not compromise
away its revolutionary birthright but remained true to revolutionary Marxism.
What emerged in 1912 was, nonetheless, a Bolshevik party, with a Bolshevik
leadership, following a Bolshevik line. To deny that Lenin could even imagine
that such a thing might emerge from the 1912 Prague conference is interesting
and worth considering but not entirely persuasive to me. But there is work to be
done to clarify what the most plausible answers might be to this and other
questions.

Lessons for Our Time (and Non-Lessons)

At this point I would like to turn to the question of finding lessons—and non-
lessons—in all of this for our own time. Obviously, if we are being serious about
studying and understanding history, we can’t be satisfied with an approach
through which we construct morality tales to validate ourselves, our
organizations, and specific political projects. Nor can we expect to find
readymade recipes with which to cook up revolutionary dishes for the here and
now. We can find lessons and insights that might help us figure out what to do—
but we have to be serious as we do that, avoiding uncritical idealizations, and
trying to identify similarities and differences between, for example, Lenin’s
context and our own.
 Nothing that we face is just as it was for Lenin and his comrades. Our 1903
and 1905 and 1912 and 1917 may not look at all like theirs, and the sequence of
events may differ dramatically. We should avoid acting and talking as if we were
in the equivalent of their 1912 or 1917 when, in fact, we may be closer to the
equivalent of their 1898 or 1901. More than this, in our present-day contexts, to
the extent that the socialist movement and the working class are not intertwined
and interacting in significant ways, we have not gotten beyond Square One of
revolutionary politics. In some ways, our reality has little to do with the reality in
which there was a Second International or Third International—it is in some
ways closer to the reality existing before the creation of the First International.11
By the way, this notion that our pathways cannot possibly duplicate those of
Lenin and his comrades happens to constitute a central tenet of “Leninist
orthodoxy.” In 1919 he commented that “each nation is travelling in the same
historical direction” but each must follow “very different zigzags and byways.”
He added that “the more cultured nations are obviously proceeding in a way that
differs from that of the less cultured nations. Finland is advancing in a different
way. Germany is advancing in a different way.” In 1921 he urged yet other
comrades to “refrain from copying our tactics but thoroughly vary them and
adapt them to the different concrete conditions.” He told Italian comrades that
principles “must be adapted to the specific conditions of various countries. The
revolution in Italy will run a different course from that in Russia. It will start in a
different way. How? Neither you nor we know.” In 1922 Lenin told comrades in
the Communist International that they should not “hang Russian experience in a
corner like an icon and pray to it.” I should add that this last comment did not—
contrary to some misinterpretations—mean that Lenin believed the Russian
experience was irrelevant, but rather that it should be critically studied,
assimilated, and applied creatively to new and different contexts.12
Giving Lenin the attention he deserves involves an approach of critical
engagement. To study Lenin’s work means actually reading what he had to say
in order to understand his thinking. It is important to see not only what he had to
say but to see what he did. What was he hoping to do, what did he think he was
doing, what was he actually doing—and to what extent was he aware of what he
was actually doing? What were the contexts in which all of this was unfolding?
What went wrong and what went right? How did his thinking match up with the
historical experience of Lenin and his comrades, and how does it match up with
our own experience?
Even though there are many questions to answer, I believe there are clearly
certain positive qualities of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that are worth learning
from. Despite the frequent assertions of critics and even some would-be
supporters, it is not the case that Lenin wanted to create an organization that
would simply be dominated by him. More than once, a majority of his comrades
concluded (sometimes rightly, sometimes not) that he was wrong about one thing
or another, and they voted him down—such as in April 1905. In certain contexts,
such as whether or not to run some of his polemical articles in the party
newspaper, they simply ignored him, to his great chagrin.13 While Lenin did not
particularly enjoy being disagreed with or voted down, and would fight fiercely
for positions he believed to be correct, as was the case in April 1905, he favored
an organization that functioned like a democratic, cohesive, activist collectivity.
In response to a 1921 comment by Adolf Joffe that “the Central Committee—
c’est vous,” Lenin strenuously objected that this was simply not true,
elaborating: “The old Central Committee (1919–20) defeated me on one
gigantically important question, as you know from the discussion. On
organizational and personal questions I have been in a minority countless times.
You yourself saw many instances when you were a Central Committee
member.”14
Also worth noting is a point emphasized in Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of
Lenin: “He always, as long as he lived, attached tremendous importance to Party
congresses. He held the Party congress to be the highest authority, where all
things personal had to be cast aside, where nothing was to be concealed, and
everything was to be open and above board. He always took great pains in
preparing for Party congresses, and was particularly careful in thinking out his
speeches.”15
Along with this commitment to building a democratic revolutionary
organization, I believe there is sufficient scholarship to demonstrate how
seriously Lenin absorbed, engaged with, utilized, and developed Marxist theory
—not as an abstract intellectual disconnected from the workers’ movement, but
as a revolutionary intellectual who had become an integral part of the workers’
movement. Analysis, political education, program, strategy, and tactics were
drawn together by him as a clear, coherent, dynamic totality. And despite
inevitable limitations and mistakes, his record as a revolutionary Marxist theorist
and political leader adds up to something that is quite impressive and matched
by few.
The Bolshevik organization that Lenin was so central in shaping was
impressive as well, infused with a relatively high quality of Marxist theory,
containing a diverse range of talented and creative activists and serious thinkers
who were not afraid to disagree with each other and with Lenin, determined to
defend their views, to help test the majority perspectives in practice, and to help
make revisions and adjustments as called for, learning through debate and
activism and experience. It was a democratic-activist organization that found a
way to engage with the actual consciousness and in the real struggles of
working-class activists, and to help forge a class-conscious vanguard
organization that could provide leadership in practical struggles of the here and
now in a manner that helped a layer of class-struggle fighters to lead the
revolution of 1917.
Kamenev, his longtime comrade and the first editor of Lenin’s collected
works, commented that while “the teachings of Lenin as a whole and in all their
ramifications are based on the scientific socialism of Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels,” there is also a new element, which “consists in the adaptation of the
basic principles and methods of Marxism to a historical setting and period
entirely unknown to Marx.”16
To do the same thing in adapting the basic principles and methods of Lenin
and Bolshevism to our own setting and period, entirely unknown to Lenin and
his comrades, strikes me as a challenge that is worth taking up.

Facing Problems
While I am inclined to view very positively the Bolshevik-Leninist experience
up through 1917, and to assume that we can draw useful insights and lessons
from a critical-minded engagement with that fourteen-year experience, it is also
the case that there was a six-year experience after that, before Lenin died, in
which what Lars Lih calls “the heroic scenario” failed in the face of disastrous
realities. In the pre-1918 scenario, class-conscious workers and their steadfast
allies among the poor peasants establish a revolutionary-democratic commune-
state that inspires workers’ revolutions throughout the world, setting the stage for
the development of a global socialist order of the free and the equal. That’s the
scenario.
“Almost from the very first day of the October Revolution,” according to
Christopher Read, “Lenin’s hopes and expectations for it began to collapse.”
Perhaps this is overstated, but there is enough truth here to help us understand
what Lars Lih tells us: “From 1919 his speeches lose their earlier sharpness and
become progressively more unfocused, repetitive, digressive. He becomes
halting as he searches for a way to match his ideological scenario with events. A
new and unexpected quality appears: Lenin is unsure of himself.” Read notes
that “Lenin was deeply conscious of the fragility of the forces that had brought
him to power, but also of the epochal significance of what was happening,”
adding that “in the middle of the First World War, at that time of the most
massive human blood-letting ever, refinements of morality seemed not only
constricting but obscene. A few sacrifices, a moment of ruthlessness, was not
only justified but demanded if millions were to be saved at the front and from
the worldwide tentacles of imperialist exploitation.”17
Speaking of the same period, Isaac Deutscher commented many years ago:
Then comes the great tragedy of the isolation of the Russian Revolution; of its succumbing to
incredible, unimaginable destruction, poverty, hunger, and disease as a result of the wars of
intervention, the civil wars, and of course the long and exhausting world war which was not of
Bolshevik making. As a result of all this, terror was let loose in Russia. Men lost their balance.
They lost, even the leaders, the clarity of their thinking and of their minds. They acted under
overwhelming and inhuman pressures. I don’t undertake to judge them, to blame them or to
justify them. I can only see the deep tragedy of this historic process, the result of which was the
glorification of violence. But what was to have been a glassful of violence became buckets and
buckets full, and then rivers of violence. That is the tragedy of the Russian Revolution.18

There is much more to be said about this period, and about what Lenin and
his comrades did and failed to do, and about the mistakes and blindspots one can
find in the earlier period (up through 1917) that may have contributed to the
catastrophe that followed.19
Here too, there are lessons to be learned. For some the appropriate lesson is
the injunction that we must reject Lenin and all that he stood for. Given the
historical realities and our present-day realities, and the outstanding achievement
that preceded the catastrophe, I don’t think we can afford to do that. It is,
however, especially important for us not only to critically sift through Lenin’s
thought and actions during these tragically violent and authoritarian
developments but also to consider the positive ways that he himself sought to
overcome and transcend and move beyond the horrors in this final period of his
life.
We cannot afford to settle for the superficiality or the morality tales or the
dogmatic certainties of sectarianism as we wrestle with the question of what
happened in history and with the question of what is to be done. We need to take
Lenin more seriously than that, because what the sociologist C. Wright Mills
said of Marx is also true of Lenin: “To study his work today, and then come back
to our own concerns is to increase our chances of confronting them with useful

20
ideas and solutions.”20
Chapter Seven
ENDURING LEGACY

Today’s remarkable period of world capitalist crisis and global insurgency is

causing a growing number of activists to move in revolutionary directions—
creating exciting opportunities to help more and more of the rising generation
connect with the resources of revolutionary Marxism, vibrantly represented in
the lives and ideas of Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Ilyich
Lenin. As Lenin argued more than once, a revolutionary movement (that is, a
movement that actually proves able to make the kind of democratic socialist
revolution that we would like to see) very much needs to be guided by
revolutionary theory in order to “get its act together” and help it move in
directions that can, in fact, get us “from here to there.”
It is startling to find a long-time revolutionary comrade, at this very moment,
instead presenting a dismissive attitude toward the ideas of Lenin himself. We
find this in an article by Charlie Post, an internationally respected Marxist
scholar, in the excellent magazine of the Fourth International, International
Viewpoint (November 11, 2012). It is quite possible that this involves simply an
unintentional misstatement, a formulation stretching just a little too far. Whether
or not this is the case, the assertion provides an opportunity for all of us who
identify as revolutionary Marxists to think critically about our own tradition,
which is a good and useful thing.
The “offending formulation” appears in his review of Lars Lih’s valuable
biography of Lenin. There is much to agree with in this review, which largely
sums up Lih’s scholarship both in the short biography Lenin and in the massive
tome Lenin Rediscovered. Of course, one should not get bent out of shape with
quibbles over one or another formulation—but in checking on Post’s conclusion
(suggesting the irrelevance of most of Lenin’s political thought), perhaps one
should turn back to those “quibbles” for more careful consideration. So let us
first turn our attention to the problematical formulation, then to the “quibbles.”
In the review’s penultimate paragraph, we are informed that “there is little of
Lenin’s theory—with the exception of State and Revolution and Left-Wing
Communism—that is either original or of enduring value.”1 For those of us who
consider ourselves to be Leninists, this is a stunning assertion. It has particular
impact coming from one who, like myself, has identified with the Fourth
Internationalist tradition of Ernest Mandel, whose politics was inseparable from
the perspectives of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Stunning or no, the question
remains as to whether Post’s assertion happens to be right. By sorting through
the quibbles, I will work my way to an expression of my own understanding of
the answer to that question.

Quibble #1: Mandel’s “Luxemburgist” Lenin

For those of us who immersed ourselves in Ernest Mandel’s works, listened to
his often brilliant talks, and knew him personally as a comrade, I think there
might be general agreement that he would probably have insisted that Post’s
assertion happens to be wrong. Of course, that in itself settles nothing.
Comrade Post covers this base in a footnote: “Ernest Mandel produced a
convincing theoretization of the Bolshevik (and early Comintern) practice, based
on a theory of consciousness that owes more to Luxemburg than Lenin and
Kautsky, in ‘The Leninist Theory of Organization: Its Relevance for Today.’”2
Not surprisingly, in this essay Mandel demonstrates great respect for Luxemburg
(especially her “mass strike” conceptualization), but he spends as much time
very critically dealing with her 1904 polemic with Lenin.3 Still, the fact that he
draws our attention to Mandel’s classic essay on Lenin is to Post’s credit, so why
quibble over the comment that suggests that Mandel drew his ideas on
consciousness from the very admirable Luxemburg?
 The reason is that it is a distortion of what Mandel says. Far from giving us a
“Luxemburgist” reading of Lenin, it is obvious that Mandel does not limit
Lenin’s “enduring value” to State and Revolution and Left-Wing Communism.
He embraces much more of Lenin’s writing and thinking as he elaborates on the
enduring value of the Leninist theory of organization. He tells us that Lenin’s
conception is a “dialectical unity of three elements: a theory of the present
relevance of revolution for the underdeveloped countries in the imperialist epoch
(which was later expanded to apply to the entire world in the epoch of the
general crisis of capitalism); a theory of the discontinuous and contradictory
development of proletarian class consciousness and of its most important stages,
which should be differentiated from one another; and a theory of the essence of
Marxist theory and its specific relationship to science on the one hand and to
proletarian class struggle on the other.”
More than thirty years before Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered, Mandel emphasized
that this third key concept, related to the notion that socialist consciousness is
something brought into the proletarian class struggle from the outside, “was by
no means invented by Lenin but corresponds to a tradition leading from Engels,
through Kautsky, to the classical doctrines of the international Social Democracy
between 1880 and 1905.” And yet, for anyone seriously reading the essay, there
is no question that Mandel would not have accepted Post’s minimalist
characterization of what he had to say about Lenin’s thought. Mandel’s essay is
what it claims to be: a case for the contemporary relevance of Lenin’s theory of
organization, brilliantly argued and well documented.

Quibble #2: Lenin as a “Loyal Follower” of Kautsky

In his summary of Lars Lih’s invaluable Lenin Rediscovered, Post makes very
good points while introducing something else to quibble over:
Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008)
thoroughly discredits the claims that Lenin, worried about the capacity of workers to make a
revolution, advocated a new form of political organization. Instead, Lenin emerges as a
mainstream left-wing European social democrat (the term all pre-1914 socialists used to refer to
 themselves), a loyal follower of Karl Kautsky [emphasis added], the leading theorist of the
Second International, and an advocate of building a party like the German Social Democratic
Party (SPD) ‘under Russian conditions.’ Lenin’s famous 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? was
thoroughly unoriginal, embracing the SPD’s vision of a fusion of socialism with the worker
movement, and prioritizing the struggle for democracy, the “light and air of the worker
movement.”4

The same thing happens as Post summarizes Lih’s new biography of Lenin:
Lenin emerges not as a political innovator, but a quite mainstream pre-1914 left-wing socialist.
His nearly religious belief in the capacities of workers and worker leaders to win democracy and
socialism shaped his rejection of the “opportunism” (reformism) that led the leaders of European
socialism to limit the movement to parliamentary and bureaucratic union activity and support for
their “own capitalists” in the First World War. Throughout his political career, Lenin remained a
devoted follower of Kautsky [emphasis added]—even when Kautsky himself, in Lenin’s words,
“reneged” on his political commitments during the war. Only in the last years of his life, facing
the isolation of the Russian Revolution and the emergence of a conservative bureaucracy in the
Soviet state, did Lenin take his first, tentative steps beyond the theoretical and political orthodoxy
of the Second International.5

To characterize Lenin as “a loyal follower” and “a devoted follower” of Karl

Kautsky, and as little more than “a quite mainstream pre-1914 left-wing
socialist,” strikes me as overstated. Lenin himself never used such terms as
“loyal and devoted follower” to describe himself, and there was more to him
than that—but why quibble over a few words? After all, as Lih capably
demonstrates, Kautsky’s Marxism at least up to 1909 was basically consistent
with, and certainly influenced, Lenin’s own orientation.
What Post makes explicit here are elements that can certainly be found in
Lih’s account. But there are different ways to read that account. For example, on
a panel that I organized at the 2008 Left Forum, when August Nimtz challenged
Lih with the argument that Lenin was, independently of Kautsky, immersed in
the writings of Marx and Engels, and it was these (not Kautsky) to which he was
“loyal” and “devoted,” Lih readily agreed. The point that Nimtz emphasized was
fully consistent with the points that Ernest Mandel had argued decades earlier—
that Lenin did not adhere (in Mandel’s words) to “the naive ‘belief in the
inevitability of progress’ à la Bebel and Kautsky that prevailed in the
international Social Democracy from the time of Marx’s death until the First
World War. Lenin’s concept of class consciousness was incomparably richer,
more contradictory and more dialectical precisely because it was based on a keen
grasp of the relevance of the revolution for the present (not ‘finally some day’
but in the coming years).”6
In The Place of Marxism in History, Mandel discusses the evolution of
Marxism and, while giving appreciative recognition to August Bebel and Karl
Kautsky (the “grand old man” of German Social Democracy and “the pope of
Marxism” in the Second International, respectively), goes on to insist that it took
“a broad international current, embodied essentially by Rosa Luxemburg and the
Russian Socialists Lenin and Trotsky, [to] reclaim and revive the Marxist
tradition of mass action and revolutionary initiative of the party.”7 He goes on to
make an interesting assertion—that up to 1905 “this tradition had been
marginalized inside social democracy . . . and confined to anarcho-syndicalist
and revolutionary-syndicalist circles (in Spain, Britain, Argentina, partially the
United States, Italy, and France).”
At least up to the present, Lih does not seem to accept this connection of
Lenin with Luxemburg and Trotsky, separate from Kautsky—but, good as he is,
that doesn’t necessarily mean that Lih is absolutely correct. Post appears to
adhere to the interpretation of Lih rather than that of Mandel. Perhaps he and Lih
are right—but there is much in the history of the labor and socialist movements
that becomes more difficult to sort out if we set aside Mandel’s explanation.
It seems to me that activists of today would still be well served by turning to
the ideas of Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky, as Mandel urged, with critical
minds, to be sure. (Critical thinking was central to the approach of all three.) The
fact that each of them was significantly influenced by Kautsky at his best (pre-
1910) does not make any of them simply his theoretical clone. Lenin, like
Luxemburg and Trotsky, did his own thinking and wrestled creatively with how
to apply revolutionary Marxism to his own specific context.

Quibble #3: There Is No Real “Leninism”?

“To be blunt, there is little of ‘Leninism’ as a theory—an invention of Bolshevik
leaders Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin after Lenin’s death in 1924—that remains
viable. Lenin was, by his own admission, a Kautskyan—an advocate of the
Marxism of the Second International before World War One.”
There are three notions intertwined in this sentence, each of them having a
certain plausibility. First of all, up to 1914 Lenin did not claim to be “a Leninist”
but rather a Marxist who was influenced by Karl Kautsky (even if he never
called himself a “Kautskyan”), quite explicitly adhering to the Marxism of the
Second International, the world federation of socialist, social-democratic, and
labor parties. Second, after the Bolshevik revolution, in the crisis years of the
early 1920s (even as Lenin was dying) a Lenin cult was promulgated by a
majority of the Russian Communist leadership, and notions of what constituted
“Leninism” were put forward by such Bolshevik leaders as Gregory Zinoviev,
Nikolai Bukharin, and Joseph Stalin—involving a set of ideas that were not quite
the same as what Lenin believed, said, and wrote while he considered himself to
be a “Second International Marxist.” And third, the “Leninism” concocted by
Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin has no more relevance.
The argument that “Leninism” is an artificial construction of the 1920s, after
Lenin’s death, is not new. In 1977 there appeared in English the seminal essay by
outstanding Gramsci editor and scholar, the late Valentino Gerratana—“Stalin,
Lenin and ‘Leninism.’” Gerratana’s essay emphasized that “while he was still
alive, Lenin was not regarded as a source of authority—even if he possessed
considerable personal authority,” flowing from the quality of his thought and
political practice.8 Joseph Stalin most successfully and destructively carried out
the construction of an artificial “Leninism” as a source of authority (which could
not be questioned and thereby greatly empowered those claiming to represent it).
Gerratana presents Lenin’s thought as qualitatively different than Stalin’s
authoritative “Leninism.” It is complex, laden with insights inseparable from a
critical and creative process. His contention—in contrast to Post’s—is that one
finds a very rich accumulation of political thought and perspectives that are lost
in the intellectual superficiality of Stalinism. Developed by Lenin during his
lifetime, most of these ideas are gathered in forty-five substantial volumes of his
Collected Works, although it is certainly not the case that Lenin was
uninfluenced by other thinkers, inside and outside of the Second International.
While the “Leninism” of closed, finished dogmas was incompatible with Lenin’s
entire approach to politics, it can be argued that there was a distinctive political
approach and body of thought—for the sake of brevity one could refer to a
genuine Leninism—to which it is worth giving attention.
In our earlier quibbles, we advanced the notion that Lenin’s political thought
was not simply a carbon copy of Kautsky’s. The “Marxism of the Second
International,” which profoundly influenced Lenin and to which he was
organically connected, happened to include the political thought of Rosa
Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Franz Mehring, David Riazanov, Rudolf Hilferding,
and Karl Kautsky at his pre-1910 best, among others (presented in the
outstanding volumes edited by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, Witnesses to
Permanent Revolution and Discovering Imperialism).9 Given the richness of that
tradition, it is reasonable to assume that there would be much of interest in
Lenin’s writings. In point of fact, there is a coherent development of Lenin’s
political thought leading up to the 1917 revolution in Russia, as well as complex
and challenging (if somewhat more problematical) developments of his thought
after that revolution. It would be rather odd if, as Post says, “there is little of
Lenin’s theory . . . that is either original or of enduring value.”
While it can be argued that there are problems with the “Leninist” summaries
offered by Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin, this does not mean that all efforts to
sum up Lenin’s ideas (to be found in the writings of Ernest Mandel, Ernst
Fischer, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and others) are
necessarily false.10 In what follows I will indicate, for what it is worth, what I
see as “genuine Leninism.” I repeat here points made in my introductory essay to

11
the edited selection of Lenin’s writings, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism.11
Lenin’s quite unoriginal starting point (shared with Marx, Kautsky, and
others) is a belief in the necessary interconnection of socialist theory and
practice with the working class and the labor movement. The working class
cannot adequately defend its actual interests and overcome its oppression, in his
view, without embracing the goal of socialism—an economic system in which
the economy is socially owned and democratically controlled in order to meet
the needs of all people. Inseparable from this is a basic understanding of the
working class as it is, which involves a grasp of the diversity and unevenness of
working-class experience and consciousness.
This calls for the development of a practical revolutionary approach seeking
to connect, in serious ways, with the various sectors and layers of the working
class. It involves the understanding that different approaches and goals are
required to reach and engage one or another worker, or group or sector or layer
of workers. This means thoughtfully utilizing various forms of educational and
agitational literature, and developing different kinds of speeches and discussions,
in order to connect the varieties of working-class experience, and, most
important, to help initiate or support various kinds of practical struggles. The
more “advanced” or vanguard layers of the working class must be rallied not to
narrow and limited goals (in the spirit of “Economism” and “pure and simple
trade unionism”) but to an expansive sense of solidarity and common cause that
has the potential for drawing the class as a whole into the struggle for its
collective interests.
This fundamental orientation is the basis for most of what Lenin has to say. It
is the basis of other key perspectives that one can find in his writings:
• an understanding of the necessity of working-class political
independence in political and social struggles, and the need for its
supremacy (or hegemony) if such struggles are to triumph;
• an understanding of the necessity for socialist and working-class
 support for struggles of all who suffer oppression;
• a coherent conception of organization that is practical, democratic, and
revolutionary;
• the development of the united front tactic, in which diverse political
forces can work together for common goals, without revolutionary
organizations undermining their ability to pose effective revolutionary
perspectives to the capitalist status quo;
• an intellectual and practical seriousness (and lack of dogmatism or
sectarianism) in utilizing Marxist theory;
• an approach of integrating reform struggles with revolutionary strategy;
• a remarkable understanding of the manner in which democratic
struggles flow into socialist revolution;
• a commitment to a worker-peasant alliance;
• a profound analysis of imperialism and nationalism;
• a vibrantly revolutionary internationalist approach.

Lenin, not bent on being “innovative,” did not invent all of this, although he
was a creative thinker who advanced certain lines of thought—it can be
demonstrated—in ways that were different from many others in the Marxist
intellectual camp. In any event, he put the elements summarized above together
in a manner that had powerful impact in his native Russia and throughout the
world. This can, I think, legitimately be termed “Leninism”—so that when
Ernest Mandel makes reference to “the Leninist theory of organization,” for
example, he is not speaking nonsense.

Post versus Post

Some of Post’s assertions seem to bump into each other. “Since the Second
World War,” he tells us, “growing segments of the anti-Stalinist revolutionary
Left have rightly rejected Kautsky’s belief in the inevitability of socialism as the
result of the continued degradation of the working class under capitalism.” This
rejection means the ideas of the Lenin (who was a “devoted follower of
Kautsky”) are now pretty much irrelevant. Hence the terrible conclusion: Lenin’s
ideas have no enduring value.
The Marxism of Lenin, we have already suggested, cannot be reduced to the
notion of “the inevitability of socialism as the result of the continued degradation
of the working class under capitalism” (nor, if we rely on the work of Lars Lih,
among others, can this be advanced as an adequate summary of the Marxism of
Kautsky at his best). The Marxism of Lenin is much richer and more complex.
And yet, Post actually goes on to offer ideas that, if taken seriously, raise
questions about his whole line of argument. For if it is the case—as Post tells us
at the conclusion of his review—that “the practice of the Bolsheviks through
1917 remains relevant” to us today, then it can be insisted that the same may be
true of the political thought of Lenin. This is so because it is undeniable that
Lenin’s political thought was very, very influential in what the Bolsheviks did.
The final words in Post’s review clinch the case:
While revolutionaries in the capitalist democracies today live in societies fundamentally different
from early 20th century Russia and do not have to create clandestine, illegal organizations, the
experience of the fusion of revolutionary socialism with rank and file worker leaders and the
creation of workers’ political and economic organizations independent of the forces of official
reformism (union officials and reformist political leaders) remains of enduring importance for
contemporary socialists.

Given his centrality to Russian Bolshevism, then, it would seem that there is
much in the political thought of Lenin that is of enduring value. And given his
own continued enthusiasm for the Bolshevik tradition, and for revolutionary
Marxism in general, one can imagine that comrade Post would encourage
activists of today and tomorrow to engage—critically, to be sure—with the ideas
of such revolutionaries as Luxemburg, Trotsky . . . and Lenin.

What Is to Be Done?
Post’s intellectual scope and energy have generated a challenging body of work
that merits close attention. Particularly valuable is his conviction that Marxist
theory is alive and relevant to the struggles of our own time. Engaging with new
realities and advancing new interpretations, he reflects a broader current of
thought in the international Left. In grappling critically with what he offers, we
at the same time join him in the collective effort to answer the classical Leninist
question (of course, not only a Leninist question): What is to be done?
Previous sections of this critique were written at the beginning of 2012. In
December of the same year, a new essay by Post appeared entitled “What Is Left
of Leninism?,” which seems to present a broader appreciation, and as such is
worth commenting on here.12 Instead of dismissing the very concept of
Leninism, Post now tells us that “the enduring legacy of Leninism remains the
goal of constructing an independent organization of anti-capitalist organizers and
activists who attempt to project a political alternative to the forces of official
reformism not only in elections, but in mass, extra-parliamentary social
struggles.”
It seems to me that this is true as far as it goes, although if that’s all there is, it
seems to place Lenin slightly to the left of Saul Alinsky. A radical community
organizer in the United States from the 1940s through the 1960s, Alinsky wrote
a biography of his mentor John L. Lewis (the remarkable leader of the Congress
of Industrial Organizations) and set down his own ideas about organizing for
social change in the interesting and useful books Reveille for Radicals and Rules
for Radicals—providing a political alternative to the forces of official reformism
for organizers and activists, involving extra-parliamentary “grassroots” social
struggles, although he did not use the term “anticapitalist.”13 In fact, Lenin wrote
much more, said much more, and offers activists and organizers much more than
comes through in this minimized “Leninism.”
Post is a writer and analyst to take seriously, not least because of his
acclaimed and challenging recent work America’s Road to Capitalism. But in
this essay it can be argued that he is attempting to accomplish far too much in far
too little space. One section of the essay reviews “The World of Mass Social
Democratic Parties, 1890–1914” (a massive topic indeed, which he covers in
twelve paragraphs), another turns to “The Rise and Decline of the Communist
Parties, 1919–1990” (even more massive, therefore requiring fourteen
paragraphs), and he finally considers “The Post–Second World War
Revolutionary Left” (seven paragraphs).
These thirty-one “historical” paragraphs are by no means devoid of
thoughtful points or interesting ideas—but neither are they an adequate summary
of what happened in history, despite the display of scholarly apparatus. For
example, the whole twelve hundred–plus pages of John Riddell’s edited volume
of proceedings of the 1922 World Congress of the Communist International, plus
chapters 5 through 23 (four hundred pages) of Pierre Broué’s massive work on
the German Revolution, plus David Morgan’s five hundred pages on The
Socialist Left and the German Revolution are cited—without specific quotations
or page references—to “document” Post’s sweeping generalizations of what
happened in the early Communist movement from 1919 to 1922. After citing all
of this material, Post goes on to assure us that “the Comintern actually
undermined the development of the non-Russian parties,” a one-sided
generalization that is demonstrably false in more than one instance, even though
accurate in other instances. Sorting through the different instances and making
sense of them is, unfortunately, not a responsibility he chooses to assume.
Post repeats the misleading point made in his review of Lars Lih’s Lenin
biography: “‘Leninism’ as a distinct organizational theory and practice was
invented during the ‘Bolshevization’ campaign of 1924–25.” But he also
restates, in a slightly different way, his earlier “left-Alinskyist” definition: “The
rational core of the Leninist organizational practice before 1923 was the
rejection of a division of labor between the party and unions and the construction
of an organization of revolutionary worker activists independently of the labor
and parliamentary officialdom capable of contesting the latter’s leadership of the
workers’ movement.” The exact meaning of this overly succinct point is not
clear, either in regard to specific historical actualities or in regard to on-the-
ground practical politics. It seems to be related to the well-known fact, noted in
his brief historical summary, that bureaucratic-conservatism and
nonrevolutionary reformism infected the mass workers’ movements led by
Social Democrats and Stalinists, and that Lenin’s thinking was inconsistent with
this. This notion plays an important role in the final portion of his essay—the
twelve paragraphs he utilizes to examine “The New Left Parties in Europe.”
In this section, Post makes passing reference to disappointing developments
in Britain and France (and for some reason totally ignores more volatile
developments in Spain, Portugal, and especially Greece), focusing instead on the
once-promising Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) in Italy and the
fluctuating fortunes of the left party (Die Linke) in Germany. Even here,
however, the eight paragraphs he is able to devote to the experiences of the two
parties cannot take us very far in understanding what is what. He concludes,
however, that “ultimately, two factors will shape the future of these new political
formations.” Most crucial, he asserts quite plausibly, “is the outcome of extra-
parliamentary struggles over austerity and privatization, which will shape the
political consciousness and confidence of party militants and broad sectors of the
working-class and popular movements.” This by itself, of course, will not
resolve the problem.
The second key factor, according to Post, gets back to what he sees as “what
is left of Leninism.” This involves “the relative strength within these parties of
the ‘militant minority’ of workplace and movement activists and the conscious
anti-capitalist left, on one side, and, the forces of official reformism on the
other.” Specifically, “the key will be the revival of the rational core of Leninism
—the transcendence of the division of labor between party and unions and
movements through the organization of radical and revolutionary activists who
attempt to contest the forces of official reformism over the conduct of mass
struggle.” To clarify what this means, Post puts it “another way,” suggesting that
“the ‘militant minority’” must seek to “transform these parties into organizations
contesting the direction of all struggles, electoral and extra-electoral.” To clarify
further, this would be the opposite of allowing “the union-party officialdom” to
“maintain the division between ‘politics’ (elections) and ‘economics’ (union
struggles).”
Such formulations do not seem to match up with all that Lenin had to say, and
all that he tried to do. Nor do they offer a clear orientation for revolutionary
activists and organizers of our own time. Perhaps if we engage more seriously
than Post is inclined to do with what Lenin wrote about similar realities in his
time, we will be able to turn to ours with more to work with. The minimalist and
even somewhat dismissive approach to “what is left of Leninism” (and to what
Leninism added up to in the first place) does not seem to me particularly fruitful.
The actual “Leninism” of Lenin can be a resource for us as we try to figure out
what is to be done.
Chapter Eight
LUXEMBURG AND LENIN THROUGH EACH
OTHER’S EYES

According to Karl Marx, the liberation of the laboring majority must come about
through the democratic activity of that majority. Some people must win others to
an understanding of the need for struggle, and to ideas of how best to struggle
against oppression. Among those with the knowledge, insight, and courage (who
seek to inspire and help more and more people to develop their own capacity for
such qualities), there are inevitably different points of view on how to
understand the world and how best to change it. So there is a need for
democratic discussion and debate, as organizations of revolutionaries seek to
understand the complex realities of global capitalism and how to replace
capitalism with the political freedom and the economic democracy that Marx
and other scientific socialists have associated with the future society.
This is the framework in which we can best understand the relationship of
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, two of the greatest revolutionary
socialists of the twentieth century. Each had risen to the top rank within the left
wing of the international labor movement, in the mass parties that had joined
together in the Socialist International, also known as the Second International.
Both were brilliant, highly educated, and absolutely committed to the Marxist
approach to reality.1
There are four broad areas in which they expressed differences with each
other: (1) questions of building a revolutionary organization, (2) the relationship
of democracy to socialism, (3) confrontations of nationalism with
internationalism, and (4) issues of imperialism and capitalist development. What
I will argue here is that there is less irreconcilable contradiction, and greater
overlap, than is often acknowledged.

Personal Relationship
Before considering these differences, it is worth considering the personal
relationship of these revolutionaries. The two had met in 1901, then had crossed
swords polemically in 1904, when Luxemburg lined up temporarily with Lenin’s
Menshevik opponents in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).
They actually got to know each other, however, amid the revolutionary workers’
insurgencies sweeping through Russia and Eastern Europe in 1905–1906. One of
Luxemburg’s biographers, Elzbieta Ettinger, tells us that she was impressed
“with his exceptional mind, a quality always seductive to her, and with his
enormous will power and broad knowledge of the Russian reality. He was
erudite, shrewd, and determined. The theorists she knew paled in comparison.”
At a 1907 conference of the Second International, Luxemburg pointed him out to
her friend Clara Zetkin. “Take a good look at him. That is Lenin. Look at the
self-willed stubborn head. A real Russian peasant’s head with a few faintly
Asiatic lines. That man will try to overturn mountains. Perhaps he will be
crushed by them. But he will never yield.”2 Another Luxemburg biographer, J. P.
Nettl, has elaborated on this, commenting:
A personal sympathy between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg—based, like all Lenin’s friendships,
on mutual respect—was born at this time [in 1906] and was to survive for six years until party
differences drowned it once more in the froth of polemics. Even then a spark of personal
sympathy always survived the renewed hostilities; though Lenin fell out completely with Leo
Jogiches [Luxemburg’s close comrade in the Polish movement] and necessarily included Rosa
Luxemburg in his onslaught on the ‘old’ Polish leadership, he never went for her personally as he
did in the case of Jogiches—while she in turn deliberately abstained from any public reply to his
attacks.3

Hannah Arendt, a knowledgeable political theorist in her own right, in

summarizing the findings of Nettl’s research, noted that central to “Luxemburg’s
public and private life” was the fact that she was part of “a peer group” that had
crystallized—for her—among revolutionaries in Poland, which represented a
much broader phenomenon. Something quite similar was described, for example,
by another, lesser-known revolutionary of the same period in the Odessa
underground, Eugenia Levitskaya. “Turning in my mind the mass of comrades
with whom I had occasion to meet, I cannot recall a single reprehensible,
contemptible act, a single deception or lie,” she wrote. “There was friction.
There were faction differences of opinion. But no more than that. Somehow
everyone looked after himself morally, became better and more gentle in that
friendly family.”
Commenting that Nettl “stresses repeatedly the high moral standards of ‘the
peer group,’” Arendt emphasized that within this revolutionary peer group “such
things as ambition, career, status, and even mere success were under the strictest
taboo”—at least when it came to the personal level. On the other hand, they
shared a powerful ambition for, as Luxemburg joked, “setting a prairie on fire”
to advance the cause of working-class revolution and socialist liberation. Arendt
comments that Lenin shared the values of Luxemburg’s peer group. More than
this, based on Nettl’s findings she concludes that “there were few people she
respected [as intellectual equals], and Jogiches headed a list on which only the
names of Lenin and [Marx’s outstanding biographer] Franz Mehring could be
inscribed with certainty.”4
There was also a certain chemistry of their personalities that made possible
such a relationship—what Gorky captured in describing Lenin as with the words
“he loved fun and when he laughed it was with his whole body,” and the often
wicked sense of humor that one can also find in Luxemburg’s polemics and
letters. In 1911, she wrote: “Yesterday Lenin came, and up to today he has been
here four times already. I enjoy talking with him, he’s clever and well educated,
and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at.” She commented that her
cat Mimi “impressed Lenin tremendously, he said that only in Siberia had he
seen such a magnificent creature, that she was a baskii kot—a majestic cat. She
also flirted with him, rolled on her back and behaved enticingly toward him, but
when he tried to approach her she whacked him with a paw and snarled like a

5
tiger.”5
Mimi’s behavior captures something of the relationship between Luxemburg
and Lenin—their polemics with each other, and mutual criticisms, could be as
sharp and unyielding. The case can be made, however, that neither Lenin nor
Luxemburg was invariably correct in these various disputes. More than that, it
can be argued that even when wrong about something, each was able to identify
important aspects of the truth.

Nationalism and Imperialism

Luxemburg’s approach to nationalism is in some ways inferior to Lenin’s—she
tends toward a full-scale dismissal of it as an obstacle to working-class
internationalism, while Lenin is attentive to differences between the nationalism
of oppressor nations (involving imperialism and racism, which must be opposed)
and the nationalism of the oppressed (involving struggles against imperialism
and racism, which should be supported). Yet complex developments in our own
time give some credence to Luxemburg’s warnings.6
There are striking similarities between the ways Lenin and Luxemburg
approached issues of imperialism and global capitalist development. Both saw
capitalism as inherently expansionistic and violent, and yet there are qualitative
differences between Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital and Lenin’s
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. One of the most obvious
differences is that Luxemburg does not see imperialism as the highest stage of
capitalism, or as something that arose in the late nineteenth century due to the
consolidation of multinational corporations under the influence of finance
capital, but as something that has existed as an integral part of capitalism from
its very beginning.
While Lenin’s work is a popularization of the work of others (J. A. Hobson,
Rudolf Hilferding, and Nikolai Bukharin), Luxemburg offers a highly original
analysis that is critical of what has been called Marx’s “realization theory” in the
second volume of Marx’s Capital (some have argued that she misunderstood
what Marx was actually saying and doing in Volume 2). While Lenin tends to
see multifaceted dimensions, fluidity, and flexibility in capitalist expansion,
Luxemburg believes that there are limits—a necessity for capitalism to expand
into noncapitalist territories, which will eventually be used up, leading to crisis
and collapse. “She has got into a shocking muddle,” Lenin complained. “She has
distorted Marx.” He expressed satisfaction that various Marxist critics were
demolishing her position in ways that he had critiqued the Russian populists in
his own massive study of 1899, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.7
At the same time, even economists inclined to agree with Lenin have insisted
that Luxemburg was raising important questions, some insisting that answers she
provided are well worth considering. One of her severest critics, the Russian
Marxist Nikolai Bukharin, hailed Luxemburg’s analysis as “a daring theoretical
attempt” and “the deed of a brilliant theoretical intellect.” This refers to what
Roman Rosdolsky praises as “the valid kernel of her book.” Ernest Mandel,
agreeing with other critics on what he considers secondary issues, nonetheless
argues that “the final balance-sheet on Luxemburg’s critique . . . must be a
nuanced one. We cannot say baldly that she is right or that she is wrong.” While
sorting through and judging these particular controversies goes beyond what can
be done here, a major section of Luxemburg’s masterwork deserves comment—a
set of chapters in which she examined, with anthropological sensitivity, the
devastating impact of capitalist expansion on the rich variety of the world’s
peoples and cultures, something that one cannot find in the key works of
Hilferding, Lenin, and Bukharin. For Lenin, however, this vivid contribution was
yet another negative feature. In his marginal notes in her book, he wrote: “The
description of the torture of negroes in South America is noisy, colorful and
meaningless. Above all it is ‘non-Marxist.’” Almost half a century later, noting
the “criticism,” Hannah Arendt commented aptly, “but who would deny today
that it belonged in a book on imperialism?”8
 Luxemburg’s biographer, J. P. Nettl, observes, however, that Lenin “read The
Accumulation of Capital in 1913, at a time when his political relations with Rosa
Luxemburg were at their worst; his critical notes in the margin of the manuscript
indicate that he was out to fault her wherever possible; they abound with
exclamations like ‘nonsense’ and ‘funny.’”9 The underlying point of contention
between the two revolutionaries at this time was a new flare-up of disagreements
on “the organization question.”

Revolutionary Organization and Mass Action

There were, over the years, significant fluctuations in Luxemburg’s assessment
of Lenin’s organizational orientation. In 1904, she wrote a savage critique of
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin’s explanation of the
Bolshevik/Menshevik split in the RSDLP. She accused Lenin of an ultra-
centralist and authoritarian orientation that—seeking to ensure “revolutionary
purity”—would result in the creation of an irrelevant sect. In 1905–1906, based
on a changed situation (including closer contact with Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks in a period of revolutionary upsurge), Luxemburg shifted to a pro-
Bolshevik position. By 1907, she was defending Lenin from the same kinds of
criticisms (this time advanced by Menshevik luminary George Plekhanov) that
she herself had made three years before. By 1911 she more or less agreed with
Lenin’s overwhelmingly negative assessment with all other elements in the
RSDLP.
However, when the Bolsheviks, for all practical purposes, carried out what
Luxemburg viewed as a definitive and destructive split in the RSDLP—setting
up what was essentially a separate Bolshevik party—Luxemburg (throughout
1912 and 1913) denounced the move and persistently agitated for RSDLP unity.
The eruption of World War I in 1914, and the triumph of the Russian Revolution
three years later, opened an entirely new phase in Luxemburg’s thinking, which
included her helping to found the German Communist Party at the start of 1919,

10
when her life was cut short by a right-wing death squad.10
While it has been demonstrated that in 1904 Luxemburg distorted Lenin’s
actual views in her anti-Bolshevik polemic, even here we can find rich insights
of value to revolutionary activists. She wrote:
On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing
society. On one hand, we have the day-to-day struggle, on the other, the social revolution. Such
are the terms of the dialectical contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.
It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two
dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other,
the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the
other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.11

While Lenin was dismissive of Luxemburg’s approach—tagging it “the whole

notorious organization-as-process theory”—an examination of his own accounts
of the evolution of Bolshevism in 1907 and again in 1920 show a keen
awareness, after some years of experience, that the development of a
revolutionary party is indeed a process.12 More than this—although many
commentators have counterposed a so-called “spontaneist” idolization of mass
action by Luxemburg to a centralist idolization of a “vanguard party” by Lenin
—a serious examination of their writings reveals that both revolutionaries
theorized a dynamic interplay of mass action and organization, often with
strikingly similar formulations. In The Mass Strike, the Trade Union, and the
Political Party, Luxemburg wrote:
The social democrats are the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat.
They cannot and dare not wait, in a fatalist fashion, with folded arms for the advent of the
“revolutionary situation,” to wait for that which, in every spontaneous peoples’ movement falls
from the clouds. On the contrary, they must now, as always, hasten the development of things and
endeavor to accelerate events.13

In What Is to Be Done? Lenin wrote:

The spontaneity of the masses demands a high degree of consciousness from us Social-
Democrats. The greater the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the more widespread the
movement, the more rapid, incomparably so, the demand for greater consciousness in the
theoretical, political and organizational work of Social-Democracy.14

Democracy and Revolution

The relationship of democracy to the struggle for socialism was another
contested question between Lenin and Luxemburg, but here also the realities
were far more complex and more interesting than is often assumed. We have
noted that Luxemburg was not inclined to support the nationalism of the
oppressed, particularly their right to national self-determination, in part because
this was not a working-class demand but instead was merely a bourgeois-
democratic demand, one that threatened to divide the workers and would become
irrelevant if a working-class revolution was successful. By 1915, however, Lenin
had become insistent on the necessity of fighting for all democratic demands as
inseparable from the workers’ struggle for socialism. It is worth considering his
position at length:
The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to
democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the
most resolute terms. . . . We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a
revolutionary program and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular
election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While
capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an exception, and
even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already
achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of
capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the
poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms.15

One of the terrible ironies of the Russian Revolution, however, is that once
the workers and peasants swept the Bolsheviks into power—based in large
measure on this revolutionary-democratic orientation—Russia was overwhelmed
by catastrophes: military invasions, a brutalizing civil war, economic collapse
brought on by an international capitalist blockade plus the Bolsheviks’ own
mistakes, famine, and more.
The leaders of the new Communist regime—Lenin, Red Army leader Leon
Trotsky, and others—established a one-party dictatorship, and tended to project
its authoritarian and ruthless policies as being more than simply extreme
emergency measures designed to ensure survival but rather as a pathway to
socialism, which would allow the reestablishment of democracy at a future time.
“Socialist democracy does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the
worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist
dictators,” Luxemburg argued. Genuine socialism was inseparable from
freedom, and “freedom must always be freedom for those who think differently.”
She warned: “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press
and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public
institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy
remains as the active element . . . at bottom, then, a clique affair—a dictatorship,
to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a
handful of politicians.”16
On the other hand, Luxemburg also argued that the Russian Revolution would
be unable to move forward on the path she was calling for until its desperate
isolation was ended—above all by the triumph of socialist workers’ revolutions
in advanced industrial countries that could come to its assistance, particularly
Germany. She added that “whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary
far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and all the
other comrades have given in good measure.” She added that “there is no doubt
either . . . that Lenin and Trotsky on their thorny path beset by traps of all kinds,
have taken many a decisive step only with the greatest inner hesitation and with
the most violent inner opposition.”17
Luxemburg and a number of her revolutionary comrades in Germany were
murdered before they could lead the revolution that she was calling for.
Afterward, and after the 1921 publication of her unfinished critique of the
Russian Revolution, Lenin offered a glowing evaluation of his contentious
comrade, insisting that more than once Rosa Luxemburg was wrong—he
enumerated his disagreements—but that “a good old Russian fable” captured
what was essential: “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never
rise to the height of eagles.” He insisted that “in spite of her mistakes she was—
and remains for us—an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world
cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works . . . will serve as
useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the
world.”18
August Thalheimer, a revolutionary who knew and worked with both of them,
insisted on the formulation “not Luxemburg or Lenin—but Luxemburg and
Lenin,” explaining that “each of them gave . . . what the other did not, and could
not, give.” One can learn much from their differences, but also from what
Thalheimer called the “spiritual bond of these two great revolutionary
champions of the working class and their closest comrades in arms.”19
Chapter Nine
CAUTION: ACTIVISTS USING LENIN

“Read Lenin again—be careful.”

—C. Wright Mills

In what follows, I will suggest how the practical politics of Lenin may relate to
our time, as of 2012–2013. The perspective I am offering here is specific to the
United States. I am familiar with my own country, but I do not have sufficient
knowledge of other places to lay out specific proposals for them.
Four underlying ideas help to shape my conception of a revolutionary party:
1) there must be a coming together of socialism and the working class if either is
to have a positive future; 2) those of us who think like that need to work together
hard and effectively—which means we need to be part of a serious organization
—at a certain point, when a significant number of workers are ready, this will be
a party; 3) a key function of the revolutionary organization, and eventually the
revolutionary party, is to train more and more people in the skills of how to
think, how to analyze, how to organize meetings and struggles, how to reach out
and help educate and train more and more people in this way; and 4) a key
function of the revolutionary organization, and ultimately the revolutionary
party, is to act as a democratic/disciplined force in actual workers’ struggles in
ways that help to advance those struggles—that is the path to socialism.
A serious organization means not a social club or affinity group for those who
like socialism. It is also not a missionary group—appealing from outside the
working class, urging people to listen to our socialist ideas, buy our socialist
literature, come to our socialist meetings, and join with us in thinking
revolutionary thoughts. This can be a way to attract some handfuls of thoughtful
people. But some of us have also had enough experience to know that this
doesn’t work as a means for mobilizing a working-class majority in the effort to
replace capitalism with socialism. This leaves us with the question: What is a
serious socialist organization?
In reaching for an answer, I want to do several things. First, I want to check in
with Marx and Engels on what they thought about the revolutionary party and
program. Second, I want to draw from the Russian experience—particularly as
reflected in what Lenin had to say. Third, I want to sketch aspects of the US
experience in building revolutionary movements and parties. Fourth, I want to
discuss some fatal illusions that infected the 1960s generation of would-be
“Leninists” in the United States. And finally, I want to explore aspects of where
we are now—the present-day context in which would-be party-builders in the
United States find themselves, and the practical tasks I think make sense in this
context.

Checking In with Marx and Engels

The working class, as Marx and Engels defined it, is composed of those who
make a living by selling their ability to work (which consists of energy for
manual labor, intellectual labor, or both). It is those whose labor creates the
goods and services all of us depend on. It also includes family members and
others dependent on the paychecks of those who sell their ability to work—and
also unemployed and retired workers. It is the creative majority, whose labor
creates and sustains the economy on which society depends, those without whom
capitalism could not function. This is a force that potentially has the interest and
the power to challenge capitalism. If they join together, the workers have the
power to bring to birth a new and better world. There are aspects in the dynamics
of capitalism that create more and more workers and dynamics that tend to push
them in this direction.
According to Marx and Engels, revolutionary socialists, or communists,
should not see themselves apart from the actual lives and struggles and
movements and organizations of the working class. They are—or should be—an
organic part of the working class and the movements and organizations of the
workers that struggle for working-class emancipation. At the same time, those of
us who are revolutionary socialists have a specific understanding—which we
have a responsibility to share with others in our class—of the need for working-
class solidarity and of what Marx and Engels called “the historic line of march”
that we should also share and help to implement. Those who think and act this
way constitute a vanguard layer of the working class. Elements of this vanguard
layer—in the course of history—sometimes sought to advance this work by
pulling together into organizations affiliated with the International
Workingmen’s Association, later the Socialist International, and later yet the
Communist International.
The “historic line of march” that Marx and Engels referred to is sometimes
called a “program.” The Communist Manifesto advances such a program—that
is, an outline of what to do to push back capitalist oppression and to achieve a
socialist future. Marx based this program, to a significant degree, on the kinds of
struggles he saw working-class activists engaging in.
This program consists of different parts. One involves building organizations
of workers at their workplaces—these are known as trade unions—in order to
struggle for and compel capitalist employers to pay higher wages, provide better
(healthier, safer) working conditions, to agree to a shorter workday (ten hours
instead of twelve, eight instead of ten, and so on), and to allow for more dignity
on the job. In addition to building trade unions, the Manifesto encourages
workers to push for reforms (which means improving life in the here and now,
before a revolution takes place), which could be fought for by social movements
for a shorter workday, for giving all people the right to vote, for women’s rights,
for an end to child labor, for public schools, for an end to racism, in opposition
to war policies, and so on.
In addition to building such trade unions and social movements, Marx
advocated the creation of an independent labor party of the working class to
struggle for reforms and ultimately to win political power for the working class
majority. Marx and Engels called this “winning the battle of democracy,”
establishing working-class rule politically in order to expand it economically,
with a revolutionary transition to socialism. That’s the program.
I think the independent labor party was the ultimate revolutionary party Marx
and Engels had in mind, but like us they also participated in revolutionary
groups (some more formal than others) to help carry out the work up until that
party came into being. By the time of the Socialist International, however, in the
years from 1889 to 1914, there were a number of such parties that came into
being—although, when push came to shove, most of them turned out not to be
revolutionary after all. An exception was what turned out to be a majority (or
Bolshevik) segment of the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party, which led
the great 1917 revolution that inaugurated the modern Communist movement.

The Russian and US Experience

Of course, it was Lenin’s leadership that was a key factor in all of this, and one
aspect of that—one of the reasons it is so fruitful to study his writings—is that
he not only helped make a revolution, but he played a central role in analyzing
and preparing the conditions in which it could be made. As Lars Lih has argued
so well, it is not the case that Lenin sought to build a so-called “party of a new
type,” but it is the case that more insightfully and creatively and consistently
than many, he helped to elaborate and apply the organizational principles of the
revolutionary party that most Marxists formally adhered to. Central to Lenin, as
to Marx, was the notion that the workers’ movement and socialism must be
merged. With Lenin we also find an alertness to the existence of different
working-class layers—a relatively small layer animated by a high degree of
experience, commitment, and revolutionary class consciousness, also a broader
conscious and activist layer, as well as the less conscious and less active mass of
workers (elements of which would be drawn into the more advanced layers over
the course of time and struggle). And more than many, Lenin emphasized the
need for a high degree of revolutionary activism and discipline in the
organization of the working-class vanguard.
This was conceived of largely as self-discipline—and was a discipline related
to an organization not only with a revolutionary program, but one which had
been able to prove itself in mass struggles, and one organically rooted in the
working class. It is worth reminding ourselves of Lenin’s argument in Left-Wing
Communism: An Infantile Disorder that there are three necessary conditions for
a genuinely revolutionary party. First is the revolutionary class consciousness of
a vanguard layer of the working class. Second is a correct political strategy and
tactics on the part of organized revolutionaries. Third is an intimate and
sustained contact “with the broadest masses of working people.” Without these
conditions being met, Lenin tells us, all attempts at a disciplined revolutionary
party will “inevitably fall flat and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.”1
This gets at one of the key problems facing would-be party-builders in the
United States for several decades. For the most part, revolutionary Marxists in
the United States today cannot honestly say that we have either the first or the
third of these necessary conditions—we have neither a substantial layer of the
working class that is revolutionary nor a sustained connection of revolutionary
socialists with the broad masses of working people. Yet these things are
necessary for a crystallization of what Lenin himself would have considered a
serious revolutionary party.
Such class-conscious layers did come into being in the United States in the
past—certainly in the period from the American Civil War (1861–1865) down to
the period of World War II and just after. Workers’ class consciousness involves
more than whatever notions happen to be in the minds of various members of the
working class at any particular moment. It involves an understanding of the
insight that was contained in the constitutional preamble of the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1886 to 1955: “A struggle is going on in all the
nations of the civilized world, between the oppressors and the oppressed of all
countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer, which grows in
intensity from year to year, and will work disastrous results to the toiling
millions, if they are not combined for mutual protection and benefit.”2 Not all
workers have absorbed this insight into their consciousness, but those who have
done so can be said to have at least an elementary class consciousness.
Within this context of struggle and organization, a radical workers’ subculture
flourished, reinforced by fiery speeches, thoughtful analyses, and vivid memoirs
such as those gathered in my book Work and Struggle. The elementary class-
consciousness expressed in the founding preamble of the American Federation
of Labor is also reflected in the three best known verses of Ralph Chaplin’s labor
anthem “Solidarity Forever,” the second of which tells us:
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.3

It comes through as well in this ditty from Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) martyr Joe Hill:
Come all ye toilers that work for wages
Come from every land,
Join the fighting band,
In one union grand,
Then for the workers we’ll make upon this earth a paradise
When the slaves get wise and organize.4

And this, from James Oppenheim, inspired by embattled women textile

workers in the Lawrence strike of 1912:
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil while one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories—bread and roses, bread and roses!5
 Also part of this subculture were a variety of novels, short stories, and plays
and (by the early decades of the twentieth century) even some motion pictures,
not to mention cartoons and drawings and paintings, as well as innumerable
picnics and parties and parades. All were part of an anticapitalist counterculture,
reflecting and nourishing ideas and standards, insights and values and goals,
ways of thinking and pathways of living and acting, that were an integral part of
the organized Left over the decades stretching from the Civil War to the Second
World War. Often this “subculture” was more like a network of subcultures
having very distinctive ethnic attributes, but these different ethnic currents were
at various times connected by left-wing political structures (such as the old
Knights of Labor, the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, the IWW, the
Communist Party, various groups of socialist militants, Trotskyists, anarchists,
and others) and also, to an extent, by trade union frameworks—culminating in
the 1930s in the remarkable Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
If we examine the decade of what has been called “Labor’s Giant Step”—the
1930s—we see a variety of intersecting struggles that were inseparable from,
reflected in, and nourished by a broad, amazingly rich and vibrant, left-wing
subculture. In addition to several significant socialist and communist formations,
there was an array of organizations formed around a variety of issues—groups
and coalitions for labor rights and democracy, against war and militarism,
against racism and fascism, against poverty and unemployment, and so on.
Related to such things were an incredible number of conferences, educational
classes and forums, books and pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, fictional
literature, songs and poems, plays and paintings, picnics and socials, marches
and rallies—all blending together to create an expanding and deepening pool of
ideas, sensibilities and human relationships, as well as a sense of solidarity, of
insight and understanding. It was, in fact, a subculture that generated and
nourished the kind of consciousness necessary for the sustained struggles that
brought about a genuine power shift in US society to the benefit of the working-
class majority.
 But there was a dramatic break in the continuity of this labor-radical tradition
in the United States after 1945, due to the realities that resulted from the Second
World War, and the social, economic, political, and cultural transformations of
the 1950s and 1960s—when such factors as the Cold War, anti-left repression,
the military-industrial complex, consumerist culture, and suburbanization
became predominant. The organizations associated with the labor movement
were similarly transformed—impacted by a complex combination of assaults,
co-optations, corruptions, and erosions. The communities, culture, and
consciousness of the working class became so different from the mid-1940s to
the 1960s that only faded shreds of the old radical labor subculture remained.
The youth radicalization of the 1960s developed apart from the organized labor
movement, with the new crop of Marxists and socialists relatively isolated from
the working-class majority—to the detriment of all concerned (except for the
capitalists).

Fatal Illusions
At this point, I want to focus on fatal illusions of the generation of would-be
“Leninists” coming into being in the 1960s and 1970s, a phenomenon
crystallizing in the United States during the last phases of the youth
radicalization that had swept through our country and so much of the world.
With the demonstrated inadequacy of the social-democratic and left-libertarian
currents dominating the “New Left,” many activists gravitated to what they
viewed as Leninism—seeking something more cohesive, more disciplined, with
a strategic orientation promising to embrace the working-class majority in
something that could culminate in a revolutionary transformation. There were
different Trotskyist and Maoist incarnations of this, and other incarnations as
well. Many of us (I would estimate a few thousand in all) were studying Lenin
and others who were identified with some variant of Leninism.
One problem, in my opinion, is that we did not even understand our own class
location. If you didn’t work in a factory and if, materially, you were relatively
well off, and certainly if you were a student, then you were often put in that
fuzzy-minded grab bag called the “middle class”—and that’s how many of us
self-identified, as “middle class,” even though five times out of six we were,
according to the definition of Marx and Engels, working class. This confusion, I
think, was related to general socioeconomic trends, regarding the transformation
of the working class, which was at that time beyond our understanding. Given
this reality, it is hardly surprising that only a few of us had any connection to the
working-class movement—but the nature of the working-class movement
(highly deradicalized, with the disintegration of the labor-radical subculture) was
also not conducive to positive interaction with such young radicals.
We also failed to understand that what Lenin and his contemporaries had been
saying and writing took place in a context in which there were class-conscious
layers of the working class, nurtured by a labor-radical subculture and assuming
the form of often powerful organizations. This meant that we were unable to
understand the actual meaning and implications of what people like Lenin were
saying—that is, we were burdened with a stilted understanding of Leninism.
A number of us, nonetheless, went into industry in order to connect with the
working class, although our own confusion undoubtedly undermined our
effectiveness. The industrial implantations certainly did not mean that we had
accomplished the merger of socialism with the working class. Whatever gains
were made, many of them were wiped out by developments that we were utterly
unprepared for—the decline and elimination of more and more US industry
thanks to something that would eventually become known as “globalization.”
The long-term economic, social, cultural, and political trends of 1946 through
1976, and then the new developments in the twentieth century’s final decades,
added up to the utter decomposition of the working class that we would-be
“Leninists” had imagined we would somehow connect with. This is not to say
that the working class vanished—but it had radically changed in ways that we
were unable to comprehend and cope with.
 There was also confusion about “identities”—a tendency to separate or even
counterpose issues of class from issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and
so on, as well as from issues having to do with war, the environment, civil
liberties, as if all of these were not, in fact, matters that are inseparable from the
multifaceted reality that is the working class. This relates to a point made some
years ago by a seasoned revolutionary, George Breitman, of the US Socialist
Workers Party. In examining the mass radicalization that swept the United States
during the 1960s and 1970s, Breitman identified the mighty social movements
and the early beginnings of what some have labeled “identity politics” in this
illuminating manner: “It is idiotic and insulting to think that the worker responds
only to economic issues. He can be radicalized in various ways, over various
issues, and he is.” Breitman developed this point:
The radicalization of the worker can begin off the job as well as on. It can begin from the fact that
the worker is a woman as well as a man; that the worker is Black or Chicano or a member of
some other oppressed minority as well as white; that the worker is a father or mother whose son
can be drafted [into the military]; that the worker is young as well as middle-aged or about to
retire. If we grasp the fact that the working class is stratified and divided in many ways—the
capitalists prefer it that way—then we will be better able to understand how the radicalization will
develop among workers and how to intervene more effectively. Those who haven’t already
learned important lessons from the radicalization of oppressed minorities, youth and women had
better hurry up and learn them, because most of the people involved in these radicalizations are
workers or come from working-class families.6

This perception was entirely consistent with the perspectives of Lenin, of

course, who told us that a revolutionary socialist’s ideal should be “the tribune of
the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and
oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of people
it affects; who . . . is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in
order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and democratic demands, in
order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the
struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”7 A failure to comprehend fully
the logic traced by Lenin and Breitman contributed to difficulties encountered by
many on the US Left in moving beyond their own small, rarified political
universes.
 In any event, to a very large extent, our would-be “Leninist” organizations
became precisely what Lenin had warned against—without an intimate and
sustained contact “with the broadest masses of working people,” our attempts at
a disciplined revolutionary party were destined to “inevitably fall flat and end up
in phrase-mongering and clowning.”

Where We Are
I want to fast-forward to the present. Despite dramatic changes, capitalism
continues to exist in ways that continue to make the fundamental perspectives of
Marx and Lenin relevant to our situation in the United States. But we need to
look thoughtfully at present-day realities to see how this is so.
We have, for a matter of decades now, been enduring a multifaceted assault
from the capitalist class that has taken a variety of forms. One of the purposes of
“globalization” and the myriad of technical innovations, it seems clear to some
of us, has been to erode and disintegrate centers of working-class power in the
advanced capitalist nations—industrial heartlands that had provided the basis for
the power of the industrial unions that in the 1930s and 1950s had forced a
power shift, bringing great benefits to the working class, partly at the expense of
the big business corporations that dominate our economy.
We have seen a decomposition of that working class, and its recomposition as
a more deskilled, lower-income, non-unionized, largely service-sector proletariat
—with remaining union strength shifting mostly from the private sector to the
public sector (the opposite of what once had been the case). This has been
accompanied by a cultural and political assault—a well-financed and brilliantly
orchestrated effort to blunt, fragment, disorient, and marginalize working-class
consciousness.
One aspect of this has been the creation of a phony-populist and highly
popular Fox News universe, supplemented by a tidal wave of right-wing talk-
radio honchos and the manufacture of the so-called tea party movement
defending big business interests with a rhetoric that plays on fears and prejudices
and confusion existing among large sectors of the working class. Related to this
is the initiation of so-called “culture wars” around issues of fundamentalist
Christianity, anti-abortion bigotry, hostility to feminism, homophobia, gun
culture, anti-immigrant bias, and so on.
Politically, especially since 1980, there have been waves of increasingly
right-wing capitalist campaigns, and largely Republican Party policies but also
Democratic Party policies, which have brought us union-busting, tax cuts for the
rich, deregulation and privatization, the gutting of social programs, and so on.
This was also related to a deepened commitment to renew and secure a global
“American Century” through war and sweeping trade agreements.
But reality trumps hype, and the unraveling of US military adventures, the
rise of substantial global rivals to US economic power, and the surprise
appearance of multiple crises in the capitalist economy could not be explained
away by conservative pundits and politicians. This combined with a longer-
standing reality: income levels and working conditions and living conditions that
over the years had been deteriorating, while the profits and wealth of the upper
crust were visibly growing by leaps and bounds.
There is not sufficient class consciousness for a majority of the working class
even to say that they are working class. Most are not rich and are not poor, so
they have been persuaded to refer to themselves as “middle class”—but they are
working class nonetheless, and growing layers of them have been experiencing a
deepening disillusionment and a rising discontent. More and more of them have
been entertaining relatively radical ideas, despite their mixed consciousness.
This experience has been contributing to the recomposition of elements and
variants of what amounts to a labor-radical subculture. More and more people
who are part of the recomposed working class are being pushed down and
kicked around, and such things generate a radicalizing consciousness. This has
even had the effect of pushing the organized labor movement in the United
States, the trade unions, in a leftward direction. There is a willingness to work
with open leftists and to consider militant tactics in ways that would have been
unimaginable a few decades back. The rebirth and recomposition of what
amounts to a new manifestation of a labor-radical subculture is nurtured by
unions, community groups, and leftist collectives. It is overflowing on the
Internet, is advanced through alternative radio, permeates comedy, music, and
graphic novels, and pokes through in various corners of our popular culture and
even in the mainstream—in widely read works of fiction, television, film, and
more.
This reality resulted in Barak Obama talking a more radical line (when he was
running for president in 2008) than any mainstream candidate has done in the
United States since I have been alive. His rhetoric was only a couple of steps
away from that of a class-struggle socialist, and he was talking this way not
because he believed in it or hoped to implement it—God forbid!—but because
he believed that this would help generate a popular enthusiasm to get him
elected president of the United States. This shows how far radicalized class
consciousness has come in the United States. But we have to look at the other
side of the ledger. Some white workers still voted against him because he is
black, while other workers of various racial and ethnic backgrounds voted for
him because they really, really, really believed that he was on their side. Both of
these realities demonstrate the continued limitations of class consciousness in the
United States. We can find the same mixed reality in the struggles of the
Wisconsin working class, which coalesced in an amazing mass strike and
extended labor occupation of the state capitol, but which then gave way to the
promises and lures of inadequate Democratic Party politicians who led the
movement down to defeat.
The radicalization and militancy within the working class continue to
manifest themselves in important ways, although they have some distance to go
before they cohere into the kind of working-class consciousness we need to push
back our oppressors. In my native Pittsburgh this has been very clear in the local
turnout for recent protests against the G-20 summit in our city, in the support for
the Occupy movement that pits the interests of the 99 percent against the
immense power of the wealthy 1 percent, and in the fightback against efforts to
gut our public transportation system. It seems very clear to me that we are in an
incredibly fluid situation, with great opportunities and potential for the
recomposition of a conscious working-class Left in our country. I would like to
offer an insightful comment on this by the seasoned journalist Chris Hedges,
who for a number of years was an international correspondent for the New York
Times:
The engine of all protest movements rests, finally, not in the hands of the protesters but the ruling
class. If the ruling class responds rationally to the grievances and injustices that drive people into
the streets, as it did during the New Deal, if it institutes jobs programs for the poor and the young,
a prolongation of unemployment benefits (which hundreds of thousands of Americans have just
lost), improved Medicare for all, infrastructure projects, a moratorium on foreclosures and bank
repossessions, and a forgiveness of student debt, then a mass movement can be diluted. Under a
rational ruling class, one that responds to the demands of the citizenry, the energy in the street can
be channeled back into the mainstream. But once the system calcifies as a servant of the interests
of the corporate elites, as has happened in the United States, formal political power thwarts justice
rather than advances it.
Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human
suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when.
No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the
name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to
educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many
Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark
and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate
money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not
certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over.8

I think what Hedges says is pretty much on target. Veterans of Occupy, and
supporters, are still here, are thinking and evaluating their experience, and are
seeking ways to move forward. In Pittsburgh, since leaving the encampment at
“People’s Park” (formerly and currently “Mellon Park”), some of the most
serious elements have flowed into a sort of “Community-Labor Occupy” though
the names are Pittsburghers for Public Transit and the United Steel Workers
union’s broadly conceived Fight Back Pittsburgh. Through these and other
formations, the struggle seems likely to continue and deepen.
This brings us to the tasks facing revolutionary socialists in the United States.
I want to begin with two of the things that I believe we should not do.

What Not to Do
Imagine a group of half a dozen or a dozen young activists who believe they
have the Correct Program and that they are building the genuine nucleus of a
Revolutionary Vanguard Party. Imagine that they make a point of throwing
themselves into the struggle against major cuts in their city’s public transit
system, and that they also go down, during the Occupy Wall Street movement, to
the related Occupy site in their city to talk to activists there about socialism. So
far, so good.
But then imagine that they did not actually participate in the Occupy
movement—that instead they went down to lecture to it, to sell their literature,
and to try to recruit away from that struggle. They view it as a non–working
class, essentially petty-bourgeois enterprise mired in the chaos of ideological
confusion. And they are partly right—in the Occupy movement there was a
chaos of ideological confusion: a chaos of anarchist and left-reformist and
radical-Christian and free-market libertarian and revolutionary socialist and
idiosyncratic personal notions swirled around in the incredibly animated debates
and the discussions.
But I would argue that the class composition of the occupiers—when we strip
away the conceptual fuzziness of “middle class-ness”—was essentially working
class. Occupy was hated by members of the working class who inhabited the Fox
News universe, but a majority of the working class approved of their message of
challenging the megawealthy 1 percent and standing up for the 99 percent.
Major sectors of the organized labor movement stood up for, and materially
helped, the Occupy movement, certainly in Pittsburgh.
But the sterling class-struggle socialists, in all the magnificence of their tiny
little group, decide to stand aside. They become irrelevant to the Occupy
movement, and unsuccessful in their missionary work, so they finally stop
bothering with it. Imagine, also, that in a slightly different way, they also draw
back from the transit struggle in which they had played such an important role.
After selling pamphlets and magazines containing socialist discussions of the
transit struggle, after working to recruit transit activists to their own specific
projects, after new forces (including some from the Occupy movement) came
into the struggle, and at the moment when push was coming to shove in the
transit struggle, imagine that they decide they need to pull back in order to focus
on consolidating their own members and organization. There are groups that
have functioned in pretty much this way. It is unlikely that such a mode of
operation can result in a genuinely revolutionary party.
In reaction against such sectarian small-group politics, there are some who
have advanced a “unity” recipe. This is premised on a recognition that all of us
adhere, in various ways, to the same basic principles (as codified, for example,
in the Communist Manifesto) and that—in the amazing new period that is
opening up before us, behind us, and all around us—now is the time for a unified
socialist organization of several thousand people working together, as opposed to
the bits and pieces of such an organization competing with each other,
brandishing separate newspapers, organizing separate educational conferences,
promoting separate projects, articulating separate political lines.
But it is not clear that an attempt to merge into a single group would be a
fruitful expenditure of one’s time—because it may not yield the positive results
its proponents imagine. Imagine throwing one’s self into intensive unity
discussions and negotiations with those who are in the small sectarian group just
described. Multiply that times ten—with some of the other groups considering
socialism as a goal that can be achieved by working in the Democratic Party, or
as a goal consistent with the oppressive regime of North Korea, or in some cases
as a goal that can probably not really be achieved, or in other cases as a goal that
will be achieved through following their own particular, rigidly worked-out
game plan.
Even if we were able to create such a unified organization, encompassing all
of these tendencies, it is not clear that the result would be worth much. It could
turn out to be a big multifactional sect that is not able to play an effective role in
the actual struggles of our time, or to present a coherent perspective and a
hospitable atmosphere for the radicalizing layers of the working class that are
just about ready to embrace socialism as part of their evolving class
consciousness.

What to Do
So what should we be doing instead to advance the goal of building a
revolutionary party in the United States? First of all, we must recognize that the
most we can do at this moment is to help create the preconditions for such a
party. Things may be different in ten years or even five years—but that is the
situation now.
To advance this, the primary thing is to be immersed in the actual struggles of
our time—the Occupy movement, the transit struggle, opposition to war and
racism, the ongoing class struggle for economic justice, and more. As part of this
immersion, we must learn and learn more, help advance the struggle to the best
of our abilities, and (when we are able) to teach—teach how to do things, how to
strategize, how to function, how to analyze a situation (using socialist
perspectives and Marxist ideas in a way that is open and yet comprehensible to
others).
Related to this, of course, we need to help share and develop Marxist theory,
and a Marxist understanding of history, in ways that can be helpful to people in
comprehending and advancing the struggles of today. Both things together—the
immersion in struggles and the engagement with socialist theory and education
—are essential, in my opinion.
To advance both of these tasks, I think it helps to be part of a Marxist
organization that is committed to doing both, an organization that understands
clearly that it is not the Vanguard but instead that it is part of a process, a process
of creating the preconditions for the emergence of a revolutionary party that will
encompass activists from a number of organizations (and people who are
members of no organization and in some cases not even activists yet).
The kind of organization that I would be part of should, in my opinion, avoid
hothouse efforts to create The Revolutionary Party. Instead, it should focus on
being immersed in, helping, and learning from the actual struggles of our time,
and both in that context of struggle and also transcending that context, give
attention to using and teaching and developing socialist consciousness and
Marxist theory.
We should go out of our way to work with others, especially taking seriously
any common work we can carry out with other socialists—and anarchists too,
some of whom are fine and principled revolutionary activists. In some cases, we
will simply be doing good work together in a transit struggle or Occupy action or
union effort. In some cases we will be able to establish more formal united front
efforts. And with it all, I think, we should reach for an increase of discussion,
comradely debate, friendships, and more.
And the “more than friendship” I have in mind refers not to love affairs
(although I imagine there may be some of those, and that’s okay), but involves
seeing all of this as preparing conditions out of which a revolutionary party can
emerge—representing an evolving and broad vanguard layer of the working
class.
There is another aspect of this party-building perspective that needs to be
raised. A genuinely revolutionary party cannot simply be a collection of “jolly
good fellows” who have gotten to know each other during an accumulation of
struggles. We need to be united around a program—an understanding of where
we are, where we want to end up, and how to get from here to there. We do have
a basic program in the Communist Manifesto, of course, but we need to have a
sense of how this applies to twenty-first-century realities and of how we need to
be applying this to US conditions of our time. These will need to emerge from
hard work—involving especially learning from our struggles but also through
some research and study, and from debates and discussions with our various
comrades in struggle. Such a process of developing our program will need to
evolve as part of the general process of preparing the conditions for the
revolutionary party.
In trying to advance this complex and incredibly important process of
building a revolutionary party, it seems to me that it is useful to compare notes
with comrades in different contexts, with different experiences, with different
insights and notions. We need to keep thinking, keep learning from our
experiences and from each other, and keep engaging in outreach and struggles
and creative efforts to reach more people, drawing more people into this
molecular process of composing a vanguard layer for revolutionary struggle,
providing the social basis and needed experience for a revolutionary party
capable of bringing the fundamental, life-affirming changes we genuinely need.
Chapter Ten
LENINISM IS UNFINISHED

A tragic development has unfolded on the British Left—the destructive crisis of

that country’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP). People have been hurt and
humiliated, the organizational measures taken (and not taken) have aroused
fierce controversy, there have been expulsions and resignations, after a narrow
vote at a party congress there has been an unsuccessful internal ban on further
discussion of the matter, and serious damage has been done to one of the most
important organizations on the global revolutionary left.
A public intervention in the discussion by the SWP’s most prominent theorist,
Alex Callinicos, has posed a key question—in part as a defense of the decisions
implemented by the leadership of his organization—as the title of his article: “Is
Leninism Finished?” Responding to him, a US socialist blogger, Louis Proyect,
has affirmed: “Leninism Is Finished.”1 The question and answer would seem to
have great significance for revolutionaries of all lands.

The British SWP

The scandal and subsequent organizational developments and measures within
the SWP, together generating the crisis, have been discussed at length and in
depth by others. Some of the Internet discussion is saturated with voyeuristic
speculations, rumor-mongering, and sectarian gloating far removed from serious,
genuinely progressive, or revolutionary politics. Some of it, coming from
members of the SWP, has been informative and thoughtful. Anyone with access
to the Internet can easily read it all, if they have the time and the inclination.
Since both Callinicos and Proyect cite an article by Owen Jones, a left-wing
columnist in the pages of the Independent, I will allow him to summarize what
seems to have happened:
The largest far-left organisation in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party, is currently imploding in
the aftermath of a shocking internal scandal. After a leading figure was accused of raping a
member, the party set up a “court” staffed with senior party members, which exonerated him.
“Creeping feminism” has been flung around as a political insult. Prominent members, such as
authors China Miéville and Richard Seymour, have publicly assailed their party’s leadership.
Activists are reported to be in open rebellion at their autocratic leadership, or are simply
deserting en masse.
This might all sound parochial, the obscure goings-on out on the fringes of Britain’s marginal
revolutionary left. But the SWP has long punched above its weight. It formed the basis of the
organisation behind the Stop the War Coalition, for example, which—almost exactly a decade ago
—mobilised up to two million people to take to the streets against the impending Iraqi bloodbath.
Even as they repelled other activists with sectarianism and aggressive recruitment drives, they
helped drive crucial movements such as Unite Against Fascism, which recently organised a huge
demonstration in Walthamstow that humiliated the racist English Defence League. Thousands
hungry for an alternative to the disaster of neo-liberalism have entered the SWP’s ranks over the
years—many, sadly, to end up burnt out and demoralised.2

The first paragraph tells us that the SWP is “imploding,” which is really not
clear as of this writing [January 2013], but to say that it is currently wracked by
crisis is to state the obvious. Nor is it necessary to take sides in regard to the
charge of “sectarianism and aggressive recruitment drives” (and also to the
assertion that many SWPers “end up burnt out and demoralized”). All the more
impressive, in the face of these criticisms, is the acknowledgement that “the
SWP has long punched above its weight” with a capacity to organize impressive
struggles and to mobilize thousands and even millions is something that cannot
be said about most left-wing groups in Britain or the United States, and
Callinicos makes the obvious point:
What our critics dislike most about us—how we organise ourselves—is crucial to our ability, as
Jones puts it, to punch above our weight. Our version of democratic centralism comes down to
two things. First, decisions must be debated fully, but once they have been taken, by majority
vote, they are binding on all members. This is necessary if we are to test our ideas in action.
Secondly, to ensure that these decisions are implemented and that the SWP intervenes
effectively in the struggle, a strong political leadership, directly accountable to the annual
conference, campaigns within the organisation to give a clear direction to our party’s work. It is
this model of democratic centralism that has allowed us to concentrate our forces on key
objectives, and thereby to build so effectively the various united fronts we have supported.

In fact, there is an overly expansive aspect to Callinicos’s definition of

democratic centralism—a point to which we will need to return. But there does
seem to be some correlation between the way the SWP seeks to organize itself
(consciously drawing on the Leninist tradition) and its political effectiveness.

Is Leninism Finished?
Louis Proyect has long wrestled with the question of revolutionary organization,
driven to do so in large measure because of his own traumas (shared by others,
including myself) in the SWP of the United States over a quarter of a century
back. The political traditions of the US SWP, and its crisis of the 1980s (and
consequent implosion) are not exactly the same as the traditions and crisis of the
British SWP—but there are certainly parallels.3 Proyect focuses his attention on
these for the purpose of making what he hopes will be useful generalizations for
the Left as a whole. Yet there seems to be a serious contradiction in the line of
argument that he puts forward.
Early in his article, Proyect tells us that former SWPer Peter Camejo
especially influenced him:
After he began figuring out that the party he had belonged to for decades was on a suicidal
sectarian path, he took a leave of absence to go to Venezuela and read Lenin with fresh eyes. This
was one of the first things he told me over the phone: “Louis, we have to drop the democratic
centralism stuff.” That is what he got out of reading Lenin. I was convinced that he was right and
spent the better part of the thirty years following our phone conversation spreading that message
to the left.

The contradiction is that for much of his article, Proyect insists that Lenin’s
own organizational thinking (including on the matter of democratic centralism)
is consistent with the thinking of Proyect himself, not with the thinking of
Callinicos and others whom he accuses of following in the footsteps of Gregory
Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky. Callinicos’s conceptions, he insists, are rooted not in
Lenin but in “the Zinovievist Comintern of the 1920s, which Trotsky adopted as
a model.” But this means a more appropriate title for his essay would be:
“Cominternism Is Dead, Long Live Genuine Leninism!”4
It may be, however, that Proyect’s position is similar to that of Charlie Post,
who argues that there was nothing in Lenin’s thinking to distinguish him from
Karl Kautsky (of pre-1914 vintage), and that “Leninism” is an invention of
Zinoviev and other leaders of the Comintern of the 1920s.5
Among the many problems with this, however, is the fact that the 1920s
Communist International of Zinoviev and Trotsky was also the Comintern of
Lenin himself. (There is also a reality highlighted by the immense, very rich
contributions of John Riddell and others, that there was much more of value in
the early Communist International than one would be led to believe by
superficial attacks on “Zinovievism.”) There is no question that other comrades
in the pre-1914 Socialist International—particularly George Plekhanov and Karl
Kautsky—profoundly influenced Lenin. But his thought cannot be reduced to
that. Nor did his thinking stop in 1914. In fact, the 1921 Comintern theses “The
Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and Content of
Their Work” were put forward at Lenin’s insistence. Not only did Lenin help to
shape the theses (which included a substantial emphasis on democratic
centralism), he also defended them after they were adopted.6
Apparently to present a Lenin more consistent with political points he wishes
to stress, Proyect chooses to leave this and much else out of his account of the
history of the Bolsheviks. Yet a fairly selective reading of Lars Lih’s
contributions cannot render more than a fragmentary understanding of Lenin,
Bolshevism, and the Russian Revolution. This is not to deny an important point
that Proyect makes: “Lenin sought nothing more than to create a party based on
the German social democracy in Russia. There was never any intention to build a
new kind of party, even during the most furious battles with the Mensheviks who
after all (as Lih convincingly makes the case) were simply a faction of the same
broad party that Lenin belonged to.”
In elaborating on this, however, Proyect tends to play fast and loose with the
historical evidence in order to “prove” that Lenin himself was no “Leninist”
(when, as we shall see, Lenin actually was an approximation of what we would
call a “Leninist”). Such dilution results in the loss of ideas and historical
experiences that we really cannot afford to lose. It is unfortunate that a selective
utilization of John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World serves to push
aside, for all practical purposes, what is presented in Trotsky’s classic History of
the Russian Revolution. Consider the complex and dynamic notion that Trotsky
advances in his preface:
The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction but with a sharp
feeling that they cannot endure the old régime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political
program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. . . . Only
on the basis of a study of political processes in the masses themselves, can we understand the rôle
of parties and leaders, whom we least of all are inclined to ignore. They constitute not an
independent, but nevertheless a very important, element in the process. Without a guiding
organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box.
But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.7

We need to wrestle with the meaning of this dialectical passage if, as

revolutionary activists, we are to make our way through the no-less-dynamic
complexities of our own time. Proyect presents as the “essence” of Lenin’s
approach the fact that he and other Bolsheviks could publicly argue against each
other and openly vote in opposite ways. But this draws us away from the
Leninist “essence” that Trotsky points us to. This is especially unfortunate
because it can obscure the positive contribution Proyect makes in his article.

Revolutionary Vanguard and Mass Struggle

Proyect argues that revolutionary socialist organizations must stop giving in to a
fatal sectarian temptation, the false vision that they are the “revolutionary
vanguard,” or perhaps the nucleus of the revolutionary vanguard party of the
future. Even in its less pathological variants, he warns, revolutionary socialist
groups can thereby create for themselves a vanguardist “glass ceiling.” The
problem is that “the group sees itself as the nucleus of the future revolutionary
party no matter how much lip service is given to fusing with other groups during
a prerevolutionary period, etc.” At some point the perceived necessity of
preserving and advancing the group’s special role as “nucleus” will nurture
fatally sectarian dynamics within the group and between that group and other
forces.
In criticizing the relatively healthy pre-crisis British SWP and the relatively
healthy pre-1980 US SWP, Proyect makes the point that “it would be virtually
impossible for SWP members in Britain to take a position on Cuba identical to
the American SWP’s and vice versa.” He tellingly adds that this is “a moot point
since most members become indoctrinated through lectures and classes after
joining the groups and tend to toe the line, often responding to peer pressure and
the faith that their party leaders must know what is right.” To the extent that he is
right (as I know he is about the US SWP and suspect he may be about the British
SWP), this suggests an issue that defenders of any kind of “Leninism” (and of
political-organizational coherence in general) must wrestle with.
No serious socialist group can afford to abandon the education of its members
around theory and history (“indoctrination”) in the form of lectures and classes.
Nor can any human group abolish “peer pressure.” But what healthy
countervailing tendencies can be nourished that will help overcome the negative
tendencies to which Proyect usefully directs our attention?
Proyect tells a story from the late 1960s of his discussion with an older
veteran of the Trotskyist movement when both were members of the SWP. After
a Maoist friend had challenged him, the young recruit asked what the SWP’s
program was. The old-timer “waved his hand in the direction of our bookstore
and replied, ‘It’s all there.’” It is interesting to consider Proyect’s interpretation
of this—that it “meant having positions on everything from WWII to Kronstadt.
Becoming a ‘cadre’ meant learning the positions embodied in over a hundred
pamphlets and books and defending them in public.” This was, in fact, the
conception of many (not all) comrades of that time—but there is another, quite
different way of understanding the old comrade’s comment.
It is not the case that SWP bookstores were simply stocked with pamphlets
and books outlining positions on everything from the Second World War to the
Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Rather, they contained a rich array of material—
accounts of labor struggles, antiracist struggles, women’s liberation struggles,
the history of the revolutionary movement, writings by Marx and Engels, Rosa
Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel, Che Guevara,
Malcolm X (in some cases, also Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Sheila
Rowbotham), as well as some of the most creative thinkers in the SWP—not
simply James P. Cannon (worth reading despite the criticisms made of him), but
people like George Breitman and Joseph Hansen who developed insights and
innovative formulations incompatible with any closed “orthodoxy.” To say “it’s
all there” could be seen as reference not to a closed system of Truth, but to a rich
and multifaceted tradition, an approach that is rigorous but also open, critical-
minded, and revolutionary, with theory and analysis rooted in the actual mass
struggles of one’s own time. This may not be what that particular old comrade
meant, but I did know some old comrades who happened to think this way.
The proposed political orientation that emerges from Proyect’s piece could be
stated, I think, with four basic and interrelated points.

1. There is a revolutionary vanguard layer that is part of the working

class (broadly defined) and of the workers’ movement. This layer
consists of those who have more information, analyses, organizing
know-how, a sense of how to get from the oppressive “here” to the
more desirable “there,” and a greater conscious political passion than
the majority. It has the capacity to connect with and help radicalize and
mobilize growing sectors of that working-class majority. But this
vanguard is multifaceted, not concentrated in a single organization,
and some who are part of it are not necessarily in any revolutionary
organization.
2. Only through the coordinated efforts of different components of this
broad vanguard layer will it become possible to mobilize tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of people in serious
challenges to the capitalist status quo, which should be the primary
goal of revolutionaries today.8
 3. Mass action coordinated by the broad vanguard layer obviously must
go parallel with—and is inseparable from—efforts to nurture
revolutionary consciousness within more and more of the working
class as a whole. Various groups and individuals can and should feel
free to develop theoretical perspectives, share their ideas, disagree
with each other, engage in debates, and so on, while continuing to
collaborate closely in building the mass struggles. This is the pathway
to revolution.
4. If one or another segment of this broad vanguard layer—under the
banner of some spurious “Leninism”—seeks to dominate the broader
effort at the expense of other segments, the result would be
fragmentation and defeat. Along with this, the program of the
Communist Manifesto should be the decisive element in the
programmatic orientation of these unified vanguard elements. There is
no need for “programmatic agreement” on such historical matters as
analyses of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, or the Second World War, or
the nature of the former Soviet Union.

This approach, which I think Proyect is advancing, makes sense to me. It

projects the seasoning and tempering, through mass struggle, of substantial
layers of activists who are part of the broad working-class vanguard, helping
prepare the social base and organizational experience that are preconditions for
the crystallization of a genuine revolutionary working-class party, or the
practical equivalent of that party.
Owen Jones similarly seems to get it right when he argues for:
A broad network that unites progressive opponents of the [neo-liberal] Coalition. That means
those in Labour who want a proper alternative to Tory austerity, Greens, independent lefties, but
also those who would not otherwise identify as political, but who are furious and frustrated. In the
past two years of traipsing around the country, speaking to students, workers, unemployed and
disabled people, I’ve met thousands who want to do something with their anger.

A broad left front, agreeing on certain basic programmatic principles, he

continues:
 Could link together workers facing falling wages while their tax credits are cut; unemployed
people demonised by a cynical media and political establishment; crusaders against the mass tax
avoidance of the wealthy; sick and disabled people having basic support stripped away;
campaigners against crippling cuts to our public services; young people facing a future of debt,
joblessness and falling living standards; and trade unions standing their ground in the onslaught
against workers’ rights.

The way Alex Callincos dismisses this seems odd to me. “This sounds very
nice but is quite misleading,” he tells us, “since Jones is an increasingly high
profile member of the Labour Party.” He then goes on to repeat the traditional
SWP critique of the British Labor Party, counterposing this to the tradition that
the SWP is attempting to continue: “Started by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
this tradition reached its highpoint in the Russian Revolution of October 1917,
when the Bolshevik Party led the first and still the only successful working class
revolution. Leon Trotsky, who with Vladimir Lenin headed the Bolsheviks in
October 1917, then fought the degeneration of the revolution with the rise of
Stalin’s tyranny between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s.” All of which is
fine—and could be quite consistent with responding positively to the left front
for working-class mass action that Jones is proposing. It seems obvious to me
that the SWP could make powerful contributions to the process being projected
here.
If instead of seeing the revolutionary vanguard and its organization(s) as
being forged through actual mass struggles, however, one quite simply sees the
Socialist Workers Party as the one, true, already-existing revolutionary vanguard
organization making its way through a morass of flawed competitors, then
perhaps one can afford to be dismissive. Is that what Callinicos actually
believes? If so, then the parallels Proyect is drawing between the two SWPs and
his warning about a “vanguardist glass ceiling” may be appropriate.

Boundaries of Democratic Centralism

If something approximating a revolutionary vanguard party, with good politics
and a mass base, can actually be forged by different currents joining together in
the class struggle, then the question is posed as to how such a formation can hold
together and be an effective force for the advance of the working class and the
revolutionary cause. And this brings us back to the question of democratic
centralism.
Regarding democratic centralism, particularly what this meant for Lenin and
what it should mean for us, it seems to me that Proyect veers off the path of
historical accuracy and political logic, while Callinicos traps himself in a
problematical formulation that may be related to the present crisis of the British
SWP.
Here is how Proyect explains the meaning of Lenin’s conception of
democratic centralism and relates it to our own time:
[According to John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, in a 1917 public discussion on
freedom of the press for capitalist newspapers] Lenin and Riazanov debated at a mass meeting
and then voted against each other. This was normal Bolshevik functioning. All discipline meant
was a [parliamentary] deputy voting according to instructions from the party’s central committee,
etc. For example, if Alex Callinicos was elected to Parliament and instructed to vote against
funding the war in Iraq, and then voted for funding, the party would be entitled to expel him.

This very narrow interpretation, however, is not the way the Mensheviks
(Lenin’s factional adversaries in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party)
understood democratic centralism—and they were the first ones to introduce the
term into the Russian revolutionary movement. The term involved much more
for them than simply control over parliamentary delegates. According to their
resolution of November 1905, “decisions of the guiding collectives are binding
on the members of those organizations of which the collective is the organ.
Actions affecting the organization as a whole . . . must be decided upon by all
members of the organization. Decisions of lower level organizations must not be
implemented if they contradict decisions of higher organizations.” The
Bolsheviks fully accepted the term. In a 1906 discussion, Lenin explained: “The
principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organizations
implies universal and full freedom to criticize so long as this does not disturb the
unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes

9
difficult the unity of an action decided by the Party.”9
At this point, it is time for us to turn our attention back to the formulation of
Callinicos that we questioned earlier—that “our version of democratic
centralism” involves two key points: 1) “decisions must be debated fully, but
once the vote has been taken, by majority vote, they are binding on all
members,” and 2) “a strong political leadership, directly accountable to the
annual congress, campaigns within the organization to give a clear direction to
our party’s work.” This two-point definition is different from the way Lenin and
his comrades defined the term. Missing in what they put forward is the emphasis
on “a strong political leadership . . . giving clear direction to our party’s work.”
But also missing is the broad insistence that “decisions” as such “are binding on
all members.”
In fact, Lenin was absolutely resistant to the efforts of some of his Menshevik
comrades to establish “limits within which decisions of Party congresses may be
criticized.” As he stressed:
In a revolutionary epoch like the present, all theoretical errors and tactical deviations of the Party
are most ruthlessly criticized by experience itself, which enlightens and educates the working
class with unprecedented rapidity. At such a time, the duty of every Social Democrat is to strive to
ensure that the ideological struggle within the Party on questions of theory and tactics is
conducted as openly, widely and freely as possible, but that on no account does it disturb or
hamper the unity of revolutionary action of the Social-Democratic proletariat. . . .
We are profoundly convinced that the workers’ Social-Democratic organizations must be
united, but in these united organizations there must be wide and free discussion of Party
questions, free comradely criticism and assessment of events in Party life.10

Lenin went on to argue that “criticism within the principles of the Party
Program must be quite free, . . . not only at Party meetings, but also at public
meetings.”11
One might expect a change in the way Lenin and his comrades discussed the
concept of democratic centralism in the 1921 organizational resolution on
organization—but the section of that document dealing explicitly with
democratic centralism contains nothing to contradict what Lenin was saying in
1906. In fact, the document contains warnings regarding efforts by Communist
Party leaderships to go too far in the direction of centralization. “Centralization
in the Communist Party does not mean formal, mechanical centralization, but the
centralization of Communist activity, i.e., the creation of a leadership that is
strong and effective and at the same time flexible,” the document explained. It
elaborated: “Formal or mechanical centralization would mean the centralization
of ‘power’ in the hands of the Party bureaucracy, allowing it to dominate the
other members of the Party or the revolutionary proletarian masses outside the
Party.”12
Freedom of discussion, unity of action remains the shorthand definition of
Lenin’s understanding of democratic centralism. The creation of an inclusive,
diverse, yet cohesive democratic collectivity of activists is something precious
and necessary that serious revolutionaries must continue to reach for. It is not
clear that the world can be changed without that.

Unfinished Leninism
As a serious Marxist theorist and educator, Alex Callinicos, in explaining the
SWP commitment to the Leninist tradition, asks: “What does continuing a
tradition mean?” He answers quite aptly that “genuinely carrying on a tradition
requires its continuous creative renewal.” This dovetails with points made by the
organizational resolution that Lenin helped to prepare for the 1921 congress of
the Communist International:
There is no absolute form of organization which is correct for all Communists Parties at all times.
The conditions of the proletarian class struggle are constantly changing, and so the proletarian
vanguard has always to be looking for effective forms of organization. Equally, each Party must
develop its own special forms of organization to meet the particular historically determined
conditions within the country.13

Both the 1921 resolution and Callinicos’s article, each in their own way, make
the point that there has not arisen some qualitatively new form of organization—
whether reformist or “movementist” or anarchist or syndicalist—that makes
unnecessary the kind of revolutionary organization that Lenin sought to build.
We will need something like that kind of organization in order to challenge
capitalism effectively and to replace it with socialism. Some of the formulations
Callinicos advances seem to indicate such an organization already exists in the
form of the British SWP. To question whether that organization is actually the
party of the revolutionary vanguard (as opposed as an element of the future
organization that has yet to be forged) does not eliminate the underlying point:
the centrality of revolutionary organization.
If there is truly the need for such a revolutionary organization—that is
inclusive, diverse, democratic, and cohesive—then it seems clear that Leninism
is far from “finished” in any sense of the word. It is something that is needed; it
still has relevance. More than this, the organizational forms and norms
associated with Leninism must be applied creatively and flexibly, continually
adapting to the shifting political, social, cultural realities faced by
revolutionaries. These forms and norms must never become a final, finished,
closed system—they are necessarily open, fluid, unfinished. In seeking to
accomplish what the Bolsheviks accomplished but to do it better, we need to
engage with the praxis (thought and practical experience) of Lenin and his
comrades, making use of it in facing our own realities. Much work remains to be
done—the struggle continues.
Chapter Eleven
LENINISM FOR DANGEROUS TIMES

How can we move from capitalism’s violent oppressiveness to the economic

democracy, the genuine freedom, the socialism that we desire? This question was
central to the life and work of V. I. Lenin. In exploring that, I want to spin my
remarks around quotations from Georg Lukács, plus an old American Trotskyist,
Lenin himself, and a couple of young British activists.
In 1924 Lenin died, several years after the brilliant intellectual Lukács had
committed himself to the cause of working-class revolution and socialism. As a
leader of the Hungarian Communist Party seeking to apply Karl Marx’s ideas to
the struggles of the workers and the oppressed, Lukács emphasized that Lenin’s
thought was infused by a sense of “the actuality of revolution,” which would be
essential in establishing (as Lukács put it) “firm guide-lines for all questions on
the daily agenda, whether they were political or economic, involved theory or
tactics, agitation or organization.”1 That is to say, Lenin was concerned in all of
his political thinking and activity with the question of what must be done—
actually, in the real world—for the workers to take power. Not rhetorically or
theoretically, but in fact, to figure out what it would take and then to do exactly
that.
Our purpose—as revolutionary socialists—is not simply to persuade people
that socialism could be so much better than capitalism. Our purpose is not
simply to protest, and organize protests, against capitalist injustice. Our purpose
is not simply to organize struggles to bring about improvements under
capitalism. Our purpose is not simply to interpret history and current events (or
anything else) from a revolutionary socialist standpoint. Our primary purpose is
to overturn existing power relationships, and to put political power into the
hands of an organized, class-conscious working class (the class that we are part
of, the class of the laboring majority), which is the key to establishing a socialist
democracy. If we fail to do that, then our future—in my opinion—is suggested
by that brilliant film Children of Men and by Rosa Luxemburg’s prediction of a
downward slide into barbarism as the alternative to socialism.
Now I want to tell you something about my friend Morris Lewit, who died at
the age of ninety-five in 1998. It meant a lot to me to know him—a
revolutionary working-class intellectual and activist who never gave up, who
helped to make history and never turned away from his commitments and
principles. He was born in the Russian Empire (in what is now known as
Belarus) in 1903, the same year as the birth of Bolshevism, and he was a teenage
participant in the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Russian
civil war, who in 1920 fled from the murderous onslaught of anti-Semitic and
anticommunist White Armies that were funded by the governments of Britain,
France, and the United States to crush the revolution. He found passage on a ship
carrying immigrants to the United States, and on the ship he met a vivacious
teenage Bolshevik activist named Sylvia Bleeker. They loved each other and
became lifelong companions, members of the early Communist movement in the
United States, immersed in trade union struggles, and by 1930—in reaction
against the lethal infection in the Communist movement of Stalinist tyranny—
members of the American Trotskyist movement. There is much more to be said
about this tough but gentle man and his companion, class-struggle militants
throughout the tumultuous 1930s and beyond. But here it is enough to note that
in the 1940s, when the central leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) were
imprisoned because of the organization’s anti-imperialist position during the
Second World War, Morris was chosen to be acting National Secretary of the
SWP. In that capacity, under the party name of “Morris Stein,” he said something
that has been more than once been attacked as representing a negative quality in
the Trotskyist tradition.2 Before looking at that, I want to share other things he
said at the same time, words that fit in with the Lukács notion of “the actuality of
revolution.”
In his 1944 remarks, Morris commented that “history has imposed on us a
great mission, the mission of liberating humanity from the rotten putrid capitalist
system.” In his opinion “this fight is the only fight worth the sacrifice of one’s
freedom and even of one’s life,” and for him it involved “a responsibility that
demanded that differences be resolved in the democratic way by majority vote
rather than by the method of factional struggle, personal recriminations, et
cetera.” For Morris, this included a “spirit of collective leadership where the
collectivity gives greater strength and greater wisdom to each individual.” He
added that “our revolutionary program and policy is best served by a party of
democratic centralism,” which he defined in the traditional Trotskyist manner as
“centralism in action; fullest democracy in the internal life of the organization.”
He emphasized that “our movement must be imbued with the comradeship of
people who are in the life-and-death struggle for a common cause.”3
But now we come to the presumably poisonous aspect of Morris’s remarks, in
which he described the Socialist Workers Party of the United States in this way:
“We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make a revolution can do it
through only one party and one program. . . . We are monopolists in politics and
we operate like monopolists. Either through merger or irreconcilable struggle.
We have proved this by the whole history of our movement.”4 Before judging
this statement, we need to understand its meaning. The history of the US
Trotskyist movement involved decisions to merge with, not compete with, other
revolutionary socialist forces on the left—the American Workers Party headed
by A. J. Muste in the mid-1930s and the left wing of the Socialist Party in the
late 1930s. There were also “irreconcilable struggles” against the authoritarian
Stalinism dominating the Communist Party and against the thoroughgoing
social-democratic reformism dominating the nonrevolutionary remnants of the
Socialist Party. There was also the very sharp struggle with the split-off from the
SWP led by Max Shachtman, although in 1947 there was, in fact, the prospect of
a merger. That prospect was closed off by growing differences over the question
of Cold War anticommunism and by the Shachtman group’s gradual reformist
trajectory.
Still, one can raise the question as to whether the Stein position was totally
wrong. Should there be competing revolutionary socialist groups or is the merger
of the different revolutionary groups preferable? On the other hand, can there be
a merger of socialists who are revolutionary with socialists who are against
revolution? Can there be a merger of socialists who insist on democracy with
socialists who shrug it off? Can there be a merger of socialists who are anti-
imperialist with socialists who are aligned with imperialism? Or is there a need
for irreconcilable struggle of revolutionary socialists with those who are against
democracy, those who are opposed to revolution, those who are aligned with
imperialism? This suggests that there is a different way of understanding the
Morris Stein remarks than that advanced by his critics.
But also Morris was speaking at a certain historical moment. The United
States in 1944 had just come out of the great class struggles of the 1930s, and it
was on the eve of a new wave of class-struggle militancy that would burst forth
at the end of the Second World War. There was the significant layer of socialist
and semi-socialist elements in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO),
and the Communist Party was at its numerical high point. All of this provided a
certain context for the Morris Stein remarks. One can argue whether or not those
remarks were the best ones to make or believe in the 1940s, but the orientation
made little sense when I joined Morris’s party in the quite different context of
the 1970s. Those of us in that later period couldn’t even understand the meaning
of the Leninist concepts that had developed in that earlier context, although we
read Lenin and considered ourselves Leninists. When I was in my twenties, as a
member of the SWP back in the 1970s, I believed that the Left was divided up
into three pieces: first, those who were the revolutionary vanguard—which
meant those of us already in the SWP; second, those who were either our allies
or contacts; and third, our opponents. We had a monopoly on Revolutionary
Truth.
And when it first became clear to me that things began going terribly wrong
in the SWP, as inevitably they did back in the early 1980s, I initially felt the
darkest despair: if the revolutionary party, humanity’s only hope, was fatally
flawed, then there could be no real possibility of a socialist future. But as I
turned (at the urging of an older comrade, George Breitman) to the study of the
actual history of the Russian workers’ movement in which Lenin and his
comrades built an effective revolutionary party, I realized that many of us who
considered ourselves Leninists suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding.
The revolutionary vanguard is not those who claim to be building a
revolutionary vanguard party under the banner of Lenin. The vanguard is a broad
layer of the working class that has a significant degree of class consciousness,
that has some understanding of capitalism and the need to go beyond it, with
some accumulated experience and commitment in the struggle against
oppression and exploitation. Only when an organization has a significant
membership base in this layer can it be considered a revolutionary vanguard
party.
And that brings us to the Lenin quote. This can be found at the start of the
second chapter in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder where Lenin
argues that there are three necessary conditions for a genuinely revolutionary
party. First is the revolutionary class consciousness of a vanguard layer of the
working class. Second is a correct political strategy and tactics on the part of
organized revolutionaries. Third is an intimate and sustained contact “with the
broadest masses of working people.” Without these conditions being met, Lenin
tells us, all attempts at a disciplined revolutionary party will “inevitably fall flat
and end up in phrase-mongering and clowning.”5
The class-conscious layers of the radicalizing working class prevalent in the
early twentieth century and in the 1930s and 1940s did not exist, except as
battered shreds and disconnected threads in the years of Cold War
anticommunism and relative affluence that I grew up in and became politically
active in. The organizations that claimed to be Leninist parties consequently
tended to end up mired in phrase-mongering and clowning, which—far from
sustaining contact with the broadest masses of working people—created little
revolutionary universes. They believed they were repositories of Revolutionary
Truth, and this made them dogmatic and rigid, with hostility and contempt for
other left-wing groups that were very much like themselves. Organizational
discipline in even the best of the groups had a dual function. On the one hand, it
could quite positively enable relatively small groups to make outstanding
contributions in mass movements against war, for racial justice, for women’s
liberation, and so on. But it also served to keep the membership of the
organization in line, with an uncritical loyalty to the group’s version of
Revolutionary Truth, and to the group’s leadership that oversaw the way that
Truth was applied.
One problem with the Morris Stein “monopolist” formulation is that whatever
validity it had was historically specific. For many years we have lived in a very
different world than the one existing in the mid-1940s. Capitalism still exists,
imperialism still exists, the working class still exists, as do the exploitation and
oppression and crises that capitalism inevitably generates. But at the same time,
all of these things are incredibly different. The working class of the 1940s is long
gone, as is the working-class movement of that time. Both our own recomposed
working class and the crisis-ridden, fluidly decomposing and recomposing
working-class movement of our time bear little resemblance to what existed
when Morris Stein forty-one years old.
The reality we face now and the way that Leninist ideas apply to that reality
deserve much more consideration than I have time to offer here. But I want to
conclude with a few thoughts that hopefully will be helpful. First of all, the turn
capitalism has taken over the past few decades has knocked the stuffing out of
our class, has ridden roughshod over its organizations and communities, has
driven down its quality of life. More than this, there has been a proletarianization
process engulfing and embracing many occupations and social layers once
considered “middle class,” while at the same time technology and globalization
have eroded the industries that were once at the heart of working-class
employment, replacing them with jobs that pay less and are less secure. And all
of this has contributed to a slow-moving, contradictory, but intensifying
radicalization process, and out of this process have been emerging new struggles,
new forms of struggle, and a still-evolving crystallization of a new, diverse
vanguard layer of the working class.
The possibilities now exist for the coming together of the kind of
revolutionary party that Lenin spoke of. This means that no such party yet exists,
and that no unified nucleus or core group of such a party exists—and none can
yet exist until there is the crystallization of a radical working-class subculture
capable of sustaining a class-conscious vanguard layer of a size substantial
enough, in turn, to sustain the kind of genuine revolutionary party described by
Lenin. My prediction and firm belief is that the core group, the nucleus, of such
a party will be composed of activists who are currently in a number of different
revolutionary groups, plus activists who are in no revolutionary group at all, plus
some people who at this moment are neither revolutionaries nor activists—but
who will become so in future struggles.
The responsibility of any revolutionary group worth its salt will be to help
create the preconditions necessary for the emergence of such a party. One aspect
of this will involve communicating to more and more people a socialist
understanding of what is happening in our society and our world, and doing this
in words and ways that will make sense to them. This means we must also
develop a clearer comprehension of that reality. Related to this is the need to
help define and initiate struggles, or join in already existing struggles, to win
improvements in the here and now for more and more sectors of the working
class and the oppressed.
And this brings me to the final quote, from authors of an imperfect but
important book entitled Beyond Capitalism? that blends experience (for
example) from the Occupy movement with Marxist insights. In that book, Luke
Cooper and Simon Hardy say this: “The creation of new forms of political
organization which draw upon the spirit of the social movements, rekindle
grassroots trade union organization, and embolden participation of wider
sections of society in social mobilizations is an orientation on which the success
of the left ultimately depends.” They elaborate on “the need to regroup the left in
new political formations that provide a space for strategic thinking, that allow
different strategies to co-exist in a certain tension, while also creating the
conditions for unity and action.” They explain that this should not be seen “as an
excuse to avoid reflective, strategic discussion but as a starting-point through
which we can move towards a greater degree of genuine unity.”6
I think it is important for our different groups of the socialist Left not to rush
into hothouse efforts to forge some premature organizational unity. Instead we
should focus on working together in real, practical struggles, with an eye toward
possible unity, but with a focus on the actual struggles. Those struggles are the
necessary, transformative precondition for possible unity. The only fruitful unity
will come on the basis of joint action in such real, practical struggles. If such
unity is achieved, the result might be a democratic, durable, well-run
organization of several thousand, with full-time organizers and new technologies
being utilized to enable more and more people to become activist cadres working
together to build local struggles, as well as advancing left-wing educational and
cultural work, throughout the country. Such an organization could do a lot to lay
the groundwork and create the possibility for the kind of revolutionary party we
need.

Moving Forward to Build a Mass Socialist

Movement
I very much appreciate Luke Cooper’s excellent response to my “Getting Our
Priorities Straight.” It maps out much of the common ground between us, and it
offers food for thought for those wanting to move forward to build the mass
socialist movement that now appears to be a possibility. Given that agreement,
and the fact that some of this simply needs to be lived through more before we
can find additional things to say that are useful, I feel little need to “answer”
him. But I do want to offer a few thoughts regarding my defense of Morris Stein,
and related matters, in a way that I think addresses some questions posed for us
as we seek to move forward together.

The Poetry of Dialectics

It seems to me that things move forward in part through the interpenetration of
contradictory elements, and that sometimes there are different meanings
embedded in one and the same thing—which constitutes one of the “laws” of
poetry as well as dialectics, and of life itself. What Morris Stein (Lewit) said in
1944 he would not have said twenty years later, when the context within which
he lived had radically altered, and it certainly was not the kind of thing he was
saying in the 1980s and early 1990s when I knew him. To say such things in the
later contexts would have been false, and in important ways to say “we are
monopolists in politics” was false in 1944 as well. But to grasp the meaning
these words had for Morris and his comrades we must give attention to the
experience and context shaping that formulation.
The insights we can get from such contextualization may help us understand
and deal more adequately with the challenges we face as revolutionary activists
today and tomorrow. The seeming plausibility of what Morris said (which can
only be grasped by daring to reach for its partial truth) highlights the nature of
the experience that caused revolutionary socialists (in this case within the
Trotskyist tradition) to view—correctly, in my opinion—the bankruptcy of
Stalinism and social democracy even back then. It highlights the qualitative
difference between the years when, through the tumultuous struggles of the
1930s, there had been a consolidation of a vanguard layer of the working class
and our own time when such a layer is still in the process of recomposing. And it
highlights the seriousness with which Morris and his comrades took themselves,
which I still believe to be one of their exemplary qualities.
The kind of projections that Morris articulated in 1944 made sense (reflected
elements of truth) given the possibilities and tasks of the moment: fighting hard
to win the vanguard layer of the working class to the revolutionary program,
which would open the way for socialist revolution.
From the different standpoint, however, of being aware of contradictory
qualities among the Stalinists, among the social democrats, and among disparate
others on the Left, and also from the standpoint of relating to positive elements
among those contradictory qualities, the projections and formulations of the
SWP in 1944 made less sense.
Related to this, in regard to how realities actually turned out, the formulations
also made less sense than it seemed to the comrades at that time. Knowing what
we know now, we can argue that the 1944 formulations—especially the “we are
monopolists in politics” phrases—were quite simply wrong. The proof of this is
the demonstrated dead-end sectarianism of groups that have continued to believe
in and articulate that standpoint.

Beyond “Monopolism”
On the other hand, in the changed circumstances of the 1950s, Morris and his
comrades were inclined toward the very different formulations of SWP leader
James P. Cannon, as they explored possibilities of regroupment on the left.
Consider these very non-monopolist remarks of Cannon at a meeting of diverse
socialists in 1958:
Socialists of different tendencies have begun to think of each other as comrades. Free discussion
and fraternization, and sentiment for united action and regroupment of all the scattered forces, are
the order of the day for us now everywhere. I say that’s a good day for us and for our cause—the
cause of American socialism.
It doesn’t bother me at all that, in a meeting such as ours, we have some criticism of each
 other; and that some things are said by one speaker that another can’t fully endorse—that’s not the
significant thing about this great meeting tonight. The significant thing is that socialists of
different tendencies stand together here on the same platform and urge united action against the
capitalist class. . . .
I want to turn the clock back to the good old days of solidarity and cooperation in practical
action against the common enemy. Fraternal cooperation and solidarity in practical action do not
exclude differences of opinion, do not exclude discussion and debate as we go along. There is no
socialist life without free discussion of differences. But while we discuss our differences, we
should also remember what we have in common as socialists, and act together in support of it.7

These remarks have, in my opinion, even more relevance in our present

context than they did in the context that generated them fifty-five years ago.
There is one other point that must be made, however. The belief at the core of
the 1944 comments of Morris Stein, and at the core of Cannon’s 1946 remarks
on “The American Theses” (which projected the Socialist Workers Party giving
leadership to the “Coming American Revolution”) contributed to the survival of
the SWP as a revolutionary element into the 1960s and 1970s.8
I was not recruited to revolutionary Marxist politics by the followers of Felix
Morrow and Albert Goldman, who had abandoned revolutionary politics by the
1960s. I was not recruited by what remained of Max Shachtman’s organization
(although a left-wing split-off from it did influence me positively), nor was I
recruited by the group around Bert Cochran that left the SWP in the 1950s but
had disappeared by the early 1960s. All of these had important things to say,
offered compelling insights, contained admirable people, made genuine
contributions. But none of them survived as an organized force, with
revolutionary perspectives intact and some credibility, capable of recruiting and
helping to politically train the person that I was in the 1960s and 1970s. The
SWP did survive as such a force, and it was able to grow and play a very
positive role before succumbing to the contradictions that I have analyzed
elsewhere.

What We Believe In
The convictions that Morris Stein expressed in 1944, and that Cannon expressed
in defense of the “Theses on the American Revolution” in 1946, involved a
belief in the need for and the possibility of a revolution in our society and our
time, and also a belief in one’s self and one’s organization as elements that could
be essential in bringing such revolution into being.
During a factional dispute in the early 1950s, with a current of incredibly fine,
capable, and intelligent people led by Bert Cochran, Cannon argued that one of
the characteristics of the opposition, nonetheless, was an element of
demoralization, a loss of belief in this rock-hard revolutionary conviction. “They
don’t ‘feel’ that way,” he commented, “and nobody can talk them out of the way
they do feel.” He went on to make an argument that was perhaps not entirely fair
or balanced, but not entirely devoid of truth: “There is a line in the document of
the Cochranites that sneers at the 1946 SWP convention and at the ‘Theses on
the American Revolution’ adopted there. It says: ‘We were children of destiny, at
least in our own minds.’ In that derision of the party’s aspiration, the whole
pessimistic, capitulatory ideology of Cochranism is contained.”9
I do think there is something to this. I have seen it in many who went through
the same negative SWP experience in the United States that I did in the 1980s,
and who are inclined to move from having a sense of humor about it all (a good
thing) to no longer being able to take any of it seriously (a bad thing, in my
opinion). Whole organizations can be afflicted with this. There is so much
intellectual modesty and humility (and “sophistication”), and lack of actual
belief in revolutionary ideas and convictions, that the entire organization can be
in a perpetual mode of brooding and drift, with a great deal of joking about
revolutionary ideas and aspirations and little sense that we are capable of really
changing the world. And some are incapable of even trying to be part of an
organization, instead using the Internet as a substitute for real-world politics.
I think there are a number of instances when traumas of one kind or another
shake good people out of organizations to which we were deeply committed,
making them susceptible to such dynamics.
 Yet ours is an amazing time, in which political and social and economic crises
have generated a spreading and deepening radical ferment. The opportunities for
revolutionary activism and growth are great. The possibilities of revolutionary
socialist unity are very real. We must not be afraid to believe in ourselves as
revolutionaries, and in our revolutionary aspirations and ideas. We must draw
upon as many resources as we can, negative but also positive lessons from past
comrades, as we attempt—in this wondrous new context—to move forward, and
forward again, to realize the goal of building a mass socialist movement that can
truly create a better world.
Chapter Twelve
ORGANIZING FOR TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY
SOCIALISM: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF
LENINISM

Keynote Presentation at Symposium on “Organizing for Twenty-First Century Socialism” in

Sydney, Australia, June 8–9, 2013

Leninism is worth talking about not only for understanding some of what
happened in history but also for helping change the world in the here and now of
the early twenty-first century. I want to explain what I mean by the term
Leninism, then touch on several historical controversies that may shed light on
how to make use of this tradition in our ongoing political work. This will be
followed by thoughts on ways to apply and contribute to the Leninist tradition in
our practical efforts for the coming period.
In this particular period of radicalization and ferment, as activists are engaged
in sorting through their own experiences, gathering more information about the
realities related to those experiences, and engaging with the ideas and examples
of revolutionaries who preceded us, a serious engagement with the Leninist
tradition will be unavoidable.
That is not because this long-dead revolutionary can tell us all we need to
know about building an organization, a movement, and a set of struggles capable
of making a revolution. Lenin and his comrades lived in a very different time,
functioned within a political, technological, and cultural context that was
dramatically different from ours, and also Lenin got important things wrong—
making mistakes that, unlike us, he can no longer learn from.1
Serious engagement with Leninism is unavoidable for serious activists
because Lenin and his comrades developed an incredibly rich body of thought
and experience as they faced the oppression and destructiveness and violence of
capitalism, and this thought and experience had a powerful impact—for a time—
in helping the workers and the oppressed to win important victories. Capitalism
continues to exist, the working class continues to exist, various forms of
capitalist oppression and destructiveness and violence continue to exist. That is
really what the Occupy movement, the Arab spring, the anti-austerity rebellions,
and the other insurgencies of our time are all about. So it makes sense to
consider what the Leninist tradition may offer.2

Leninism’s Meaning and Value

It has become common among some on the left to contrast Lenin’s own thinking
to what has come to be known as “Leninism.” I don’t accept that.
How can we best understand “Leninism”? In Joseph Stalin’s influential 1924
classic, The Foundations of Leninism, we are told that “Leninism is Marxism in
the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution”—suggesting that if you
wish to be a genuine Marxist, you cannot question but only embrace Lenin’s
ideas. This totalistic formulation is worth contrasting with the quite different
formulations of three other prominent comrades of Lenin: Nikolai Bukharin,
Gregory Zinoviev, and Leon Trotsky. In his valuable biography of Stalin, Robert
C. Tucker indicates that Bukharin and Zinoviev refer to Leninism as Lenin’s
retrieval of Marx’s revolutionary orientation or his application of Marx’s ideas
to Russian realities. Trotsky goes so far as to warn that—as Tucker paraphrases
it—“a dogmatization of Lenin was contrary to the essentially non-doctrinaire,
innovative, and critical-minded spirit of Leninism.” In contrast, Stalin’s
“Leninism is Marxism” formulation presents Lenin’s thought as the One True
Marxism that could not be questioned. His 1924 booklet provides a condensed
systematization that was “catechistic in style and authoritarian in tone,” as
Tucker aptly notes.3
Related to this, it is worth recalling a very fine 1977 essay entitled “Stalin,
Lenin and ‘Leninism’” by the late Valentino Gerratana (an outstanding scholar
who did important work on the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci), who
emphasized that “while he was still alive, Lenin was not regarded as a source of
authority—even if he possessed considerable personal authority,” flowing from
the quality of his thought and political practice. The construction of an artificial
“Leninism” as a source of authority (which could not be questioned, and thereby
greatly empowered those claiming to represent it) was carried out most
successfully and destructively by Stalin, whose dictatorship destroyed Leninism
under the banner of Leninism, to paraphrase what one of his fiercest critics,
dissident communist M. N. Riutin, wrote in the early 1930s.4 Gerratana
reflected:
The reduction of Lenin’s thought to a systematic, concentrated form, and the construction of a
finished theoretical system, involved not only the exclusion of everything that was considered
accidental to the development of his thought, but also the separation of the end-result from the
process that generated it—from the oscillations, approximations, mistakes and corrections
essential to the process itself. Moreover, it should be realized that the process remained
incomplete, and was cut short at a moment of profound intellectual tension, when Lenin was
searching with difficulty for a new way forward. Thus the whole project of his successors [who
constructed this artificial “Leninism”] was from the start based on a mystification.5

Lenin was influenced by other thinkers. He was very much a part of what
Lars Lih has called “the best of Second International Marxism.” The so-called
“Leninism” of closed, finished dogmas was incompatible with Lenin’s entire
approach to politics. But it can be argued that he helped generate a distinctive
political approach and body of thought—for the sake of brevity one could refer
to a genuine Leninism—to which it is worth giving attention.
Lenin’s quite unoriginal starting point (shared with Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky,
Rosa Luxemburg, and others) is a belief in the necessary interconnection of
socialist theory and practice with the working class and labor movement. The
working class cannot adequately defend its actual interests and overcome its
oppression, in his view, without embracing the goal of socialism—an economic
system in which the economy is socially owned and democratically controlled in
order to meet the needs of all people.
 This fundamental orientation is the basis for most of what Lenin has to say,
which taken together constitutes what Marcel Liebman once called the
“Leninism” of Lenin. The scope of his political thought is something I attempted
to convey in my collection of his writings in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism.
It embraces various aspects of the labor movement: class consciousness and
culture, trade unions, social movements for reforms, the relationship of reform to
revolution, electoral struggles, dynamics of party-building, united front
coalitions, class alliances (especially the worker-peasant alliance), the interplay
of democratic and socialist struggles, questions of nationalism and imperialism,
ways of utilizing Marxist theory, and more.6
At certain points, Lenin’s utilization of Marxism was different from some of
what passed for Marxism among a majority of the world’s socialists by 1919,
when the Communist International was formed. What distinguished Lenin’s
Bolsheviks from many others is a refusal to make certain compromises, either
with capitalist politicians or labor bureaucracies, and a determination to follow
through to the end the implications of the revolutionary Marxist orientation as
expressed in Lenin’s writings. This suggests that there was a decisive element of
difference, when all was said and done, between the kind of party that Kautsky
was a member of in Germany and the kind of party that Lenin and his comrades
were building in Russia. At the same time, as Neil Harding, Lars Lih, August
Nimtz, and others have emphasized, Lenin’s thought can most fruitfully be
understood in continuity with that of Marx. As the reformist Eduard Bernstein
once put it: “Do you know? Marx had a strong Bolshevik streak!”7

Lenin’s Comrades
Another key point is that Lenin’s ideas and practical political efforts cannot
adequately be comprehended outside of the context of his comrades and
cothinkers. It goes against the grain of Lenin’s own method, and against what
actually happened in history, to present Lenin not as one among a diverse
collection of capable comrades, but as the one authoritative representative of
True Marxism. While one can make a strong case that Lenin was the first among
equals, it is quite simply wrong to be dismissive of his comrades as a collection
of “yes men” and “yes women” or as an inadequate bunch who never measured
up. A problem of many (though hardly all) of us in the Trotskyist tradition is a
tendency to view other prominent Bolsheviks, aside from Lenin and Trotsky,
simply as bunglers—they got it wrong, they misunderstood, they failed to
remain true to the brilliance of their would-be mentor.
To think that a revolution can really be understood in that way, and to think
that an effective revolutionary organization can be built according to such a
model, is highly problematical.
Two of the favorite whipping boys for those wishing to elevate Lenin above
his followers are Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. Lars Lih has the
distinction of being in the vanguard of those inclined to push back against the
dismissal of these two close comrades of Lenin. His defense of Zinoviev is
worth reading. While hardly uncritical, Lih writes: “Two comments by
[prominent Bolshevik Anatoly] Lunacharsky seem to me to hit the right note: he
called Zinoviev ‘a person who had a profound understanding of the essence of
Bolshevism’ and one who was ‘romantically’ devoted to the party. I will present
Zinoviev as someone who was under the spell of the Leninist drama of
hegemony, but with a decidedly populist bent.”8
Lih tells us that in the Soviet Republic in the early 1920s Zinoviev was
insisting that “there should be a party reorganization to get cells closer to the
factory floor. Party democracy—especially in the sense of free discussion—
should be intensified as the basic means of party education.” He adds (based on
a critical examination of Zinoviev’s writings): “My impression is that Zinoviev
was genuinely concerned about the problems faced by ordinary people.”
Regarding his influence in the Comintern, Lih writes:
Zinoviev’s emphasis on the concept of hegemony makes one think of Antonio Gramsci. As a
foreign communist, Gramsci would have dealt more with Zinoviev than with any other Bolshevik
 leader and must have been influenced by his particular understanding of Leninism. Certainly it
would have been satisfyingly ironic if the despised Zinoviev turned out ultimately to have more
enduring intellectual influence (via his talented pupil Gramsci) than any other top Bolshevik.9

I would argue that enduring intellectual influence can more rightly be credited
to Lenin himself, and also to Leon Trotsky. Nor is this to suggest that Zinoviev
was free from serious faults, some of which have been highlighted by
revolutionaries who worked with him—Alfred Rosmer, Victor Serge, Angelica
Balabanoff, and others. This was especially manifest in some of his functioning
in the Communist International—in which he sought what turned out to be
damaging shortcuts, sometimes resorted to dishonest and high-handed measures,
helped to initiate a slanderous and destructive anti-Trotsky campaign, and
launched a so-called “Bolshevization” campaign moving in the direction of a
super-centralized Communist International in which decisions were made and
orders enforced from Moscow, the seat of the Comintern—sometimes in later
years referred to critically as “Cominternism” (for example, in James P.
Cannon’s 1953 speech “Internationalism and the SWP”) and sometimes more
recently as “Zinovievism.” Cannon commented: “After the degeneration of the
Russian party and the emergence of Stalinism, the centralism of the Comintern
—which Trotsky and Lenin had handled like a two-edged sword, which they
didn’t want to swing carelessly—became in the hands of Stalin an instrument for
suppressing all independent thought throughout the movement.” Yet Zinoviev
was the transitional figure in this negative development, especially when—
closely aligned with Stalin from 1922 to 1926—he helped to develop an
increasingly undemocratic theory and practice of “Leninism” that was soon
turned against Zinoviev himself when he began to disagree with and resist the
way Stalin’s policies were unfolding.10
But Lih’s emphasis on the need to take Zinoviev seriously as a revolutionary
seems to me well placed, nonetheless. Lih also takes up the cudgels on behalf of
Lev Kamenev, the target of Lenin’s critique of a presumably ossified “Old
Bolshevism” in 1917, for example in “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism:
The Debates of April 1917 in Context” in the journal Russian History a couple
of years back. Lars challenges the standard account of Lenin—against
Kamenev’s “old Bolshevik” objections—reorienting the Bolshevik party in
preparation for the October Revolution, writing that “Kamenev seems to think he
won the debate with Lenin in April 1917,” and Lars suggests that Kamenev was
right.11 One need not agree fully with this reinterpretation of the April 1917
debate in order to appreciate Lih’s positive contribution.
A partial dissent might be constructed by making reference to the memoirs of
an eyewitness, Lenin’s close comrade and devoted companion Nadezhda
Krupskaya, a shrewd revolutionary in her own right. In her Reminiscences of
Lenin, Krupskaya quotes Lenin to indicate his outlook in early 1917: “Without a
doubt, this coming revolution can only be a proletarian revolution, and in an
even more profound sense of the word: a proletarian socialist revolution. This
coming revolution will show in an even greater degree, on the one hand, that
only grim battles, only civil wars, can free humanity from the yoke of capital; on
the other hand, that only class-conscious proletarians can and will give
leadership to the vast majority of the exploited.”12
Krupskaya described the presentation of the April Theses this way: “Lenin
expounded his views as to what had to be done in a number of theses. In these
theses he weighed the situation, and clearly set forth the aims that had to be
striven for and the ways that had to be followed to attain them. The comrades
were somewhat taken aback for the moment. Many of them thought that Ilyich
was presenting the case in much too blunt a manner, and that it was too early yet
to speak of a socialist revolution.” She notes that Lenin’s theses were published
in the Bolshevik paper Pravda, followed by a polemic from Kamenev “in which
he dissociated himself from these theses. Kamenev’s article stated that they were
the expression of Lenin’s personal views, which neither Pravda nor the Bureau
of the Central Committee shared. It was not these theses of Lenin’s that the
Bolshevik delegates had accepted, but those of the Central Committee Bureau,

13
Kamenev alleged.”13
Krupskaya concluded: “A struggle started within the Bolshevik organization.
It did not last long.” Within a week, Lenin’s position was upheld by the
Bolshevik majority. This account is similar to what one finds in the accounts of
other eyewitnesses—the Mensheviks Nikolai Sukhanov and Raphael
Abramovitch, the Menshevik-turned-Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, and the
Bolshevik-turned-Menshevik W. S. Woytinsky.14
There are three extremely important facts that emerge, however, in Lars Lih’s
account. First of all, Lenin did not feel bound by some rigid notion of
“democratic centralism” to refrain from expressing his own views if they
happened to be in contradiction to those of the formal leadership of the
revolutionary party to which he belonged. For Lenin, revolutionary principles
always trump organizational harmony, and this was an element essential to his
conception of democratic centralism and revolutionary organization.
Second, an open debate between comrades in the pages of the party
newspaper was by no means alien to the Leninism of the early Bolsheviks.
Elsewhere Lih quotes from a 1925 history of the Bolshevik party written by a
veteran Bolshevik organizer, Vladimir Nevsky, who tells us that democratic
centralism represented “complete democracy,” explaining that in 1917 “the
organization of the Bolsheviks lived fully the life of a genuine proletarian
democratic organization,” with “free discussion, a lively exchange of opinions,”
taking place in “the absence of any bureaucratic attitude to getting things done—
in a word, the active participation of emphatically all members in the affairs of
the organization.”15
Third is that the “Old Bolshevism” that Kamenev defended had been a
collectively developed orientation, the common position of Lenin and the
Bolshevik comrades with whom he now disagreed. Both the Bolshevik and
Menshevik wings of Russian socialism had seen Russia’s revolution as a
“bourgeois-democratic”—preliminary to the future transition to socialism. But in
1917 no less than before, the politics of all Bolsheviks was grounded in a
militantly class-struggle orientation distinct from the worker-capitalist alliance
position of the Mensheviks, projecting an uncompromising worker-peasant
alliance. This common ground between “Old Bolshevism” and the April Theses,
rooted in the collectively developed politics over a period of years (not the
blinding revolutionary authority of the Unquestioned Leader), is what made it
relatively easy for Lenin to win the debate so quickly in 1917.

Communist International
There is another aspect of Leninism, often raised as a truly negative feature to be
avoided by serious activists of today. That is the extreme, intolerant sectarianism
purported to be at the very heart of the Communist International that Lenin and
his comrades established, of which Gregory Zinoviev was the president in its
early years. Sometimes critics of the form Leninism took beginning in the mid-
1920s denounce it as “Zinovievism” (which we have already noted), but there is
a tendency to extend this to the historical moment of the Comintern’s earliest
days. Some of what is being denounced, however, can more fairly be laid at
Lenin’s door—in particular the Twenty-One Conditions for affiliation to the
Communist International.
Adopted at the 1920 Second Congress of the Comintern, this document began
with an important explanation. The initial popularity of the Russian Revolution
and the Communist International, among radicalizing workers of various
countries, attracted some parties that were not actually in agreement with the
revolutionary Marxist program of the new International, particularly some still
led by reformist or semi-reformist leaders closely associated with the Second
International. This meant that the Comintern “is in danger of being diluted by
vacillating and irresolute groups that have not yet broken from the ideology of
the Second International.” This ideology had led to a general capitulation to the
imperialist slaughter of World War I and the suppression of revolutionaries
within the various organizations.
The incredibly strict conditions designed to prevent the possibility of such
reformist dilution explicitly excluded any consideration of membership in the
Comintern for well-known reformist socialists, insisting that Communist
principles and organizational perspectives be strictly adhered to, with no
organizational ties to the parties and trade unions associated with the Second
International being permitted.
Some critics utilized this to dismiss Lenin and the Comintern as authoritarian
and destructive. Such an ahistorical approach, however, not only ignores the
historically specific context that caused the adoption of the Twenty-One Points
but urges us to dismiss the efforts of countless revolutionaries who made the
early Communist International a living reality. A serious examination of the
immense, multivolume work on that entity by John Riddell and his colleagues,
which includes considerable contributions on overcoming sectarianism, building
united fronts, and so on, suggests the shallowness of such an approach.
This is not to insist that all aspects of the Twenty-One Conditions must be
accepted or that any of them are beyond criticism. In order to begin a serious
critique, however, it also makes sense to take seriously the reasons given for
their adoption—reasons that at that particular moment in history may have had
greater validity than some critics allow.
This brings us to a final point in this initial portion of my remarks. We are
incredibly far from the specific realities of the Communist International or of the
Socialist International or even of Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s
Association. In some ways we are far ahead of any of these—but in very
important ways, socialists from these first three workers’ internationals were far
in advance of us. There is much to learn from the Leninist tradition. But one
must use it critically and creatively for it to make sense in our own particular
context and time period. That happens to be central to the method of Lenin.
Internationalism in Our Own Time
I will now turn, in the second half of my remarks, to thoughts on how we can
utilize and contribute to the Leninist tradition as we struggle for socialism in the
twenty-first century.
I gave a presentation in London last year on my thoughts regarding what I
think it will take to engage fruitfully in the process of building a revolutionary
party in the United States. What I said then still makes sense to me, but one of
the comrades there made an excellent criticism. My comments involved an
immersion in the specific realities in the United States—and I still think that
what we do must be grounded in the local actualities and national specifics that
we are part of. But she pointed out that the international dimension was largely
missing, and I had to agree with her that this was a serious weakness. There were
references to opposing war and imperialism, but that was about it.
For serious Marxists, however, internationalism has always involved more
than that—and it has also involved much more than simply rhetorical solidarity
with the struggles of the workers and oppressed of all lands. It especially means
grounding our nationally specific politics in an understanding of what is
happening with capitalism as a global system, and in creative interaction with
sisters and brothers fighting against oppression and for economic justice
throughout the world. Struggles, gains, and setbacks in one place impact
struggles in other places. Important lessons learned here can provide incredibly
useful lessons elsewhere. Experiences of those who struggle in other lands can
not only inspire us but provide invaluable insights about what we might do next
in our own contexts. This was true in the time of Lenin, as reflected, for
example, in the amazing multivolume retrieval of material on the early
Communist International that John Riddell and his coworkers have been making
available to us. If anything, it is even more true in our much-vaunted age of
globalization, in which working-class organizing and solidarity across borders
will undoubtedly provide the key to winning strategies in both our short-term
and long-term efforts to push back capitalist tyranny, and finally to end it.
Australian revolutionaries have been making cutting-edge contributions to the
development of such internationalism, through conferences like this, and
especially through the outstanding service provided online with Links, the
International Journal of Socialist Renewal. The World Social Forum, at least in
its earlier years, was also part of this global radicalization process. Vital
contributions have also come from the dramatic proliferation of worldwide
information sharing and communication through the Internet. Serious
revolutionary groups in all countries, it seems to me, need to find ways to
advance such virtual and face-to-face engagement, to strengthen the cooperative
process of advancing our interrelated liberation struggles. Revolutionary
internationalism must be more than a slogan, it should involve a collaboration
and activities that are central to our efforts.

From Small Groups to Mass Parties

Many revolutionaries are faced with the challenge of how small socialist groups
can give way to mass socialist parties and movements. A number of us have
concluded that it is a fatal mistake for a small group to see itself as the nucleus
or the embryo of a mass revolutionary party. Such a party will, in fact, be formed
by the coming together of elements from a number of groups, as well as a
number of people not presently in any group, and even more who do not
presently think of themselves as socialists at all. It will crystallize through
innumerable experiences and struggles, blending together with a broad labor-
radical subculture of ideas, discussions, and creative activities. The creation of a
genuine revolutionary party consistent with Lenin’s own orientation can only
come about on the basis of a substantial portion of a broad, class-conscious,
vanguard layer of the working class. One of our primary jobs, as revolutionary
socialists, is to do all that we can—through mass struggles, through socialist
education, through working with others—to contribute to the crystallization of
such a vanguard layer, a layer that will be the basis for a mass revolutionary
party.
It is obviously important for existing small groups of socialists to work
together, as much as they can, to advance this process—a process that will cause
them to go out of existence by merging into the larger revolutionary party-to-be.
Sometimes there is such a substantial overlap in the basic principles of the
different groups that it makes sense for them to become a single, larger group as
they work to help create the preconditions for a genuine mass revolutionary
party. Sometimes there are obstacles that make such fusions unlikely or
impossible—there may be fundamental disagreements around the process or
desirability of creating a mass revolutionary party, there may be fundamental
disagreements on how to relate to capitalist political forces, there may be
fundamental disagreements around the relation of democracy to socialism. Such
fundamental disagreements might mean that organizational unity is not in the
cards—but there could still be the basis for, and the desirability of, what Lenin
once called “fighting unity” and what are sometimes referred to as united
fronts.16
In the midst of the 1905 revolutionary upsurge in Russia, Lenin argued
against a call for all the different revolutionary groups to submerge their
differences and unite in a single group. “In the interests of the revolution,” he
wrote, “our ideal should by no means be that all parties, all trends and all shades
of opinion fuse in a revolutionary chaos.” He referred to other “hasty and half-
baked experiments” in such unity, seeking to “lump together the most
heterogeneous elements” that achieved little more than “mutual friction and
bitter disappointment.” On the other hand, if diverse groups focus on how to
advance a specific struggle around democratic rights or economic justice—
agreeing to disagree on points of difference while cooperating to achieve a
meaningful immediate aim—much can be achieved. As long as fundamental
differences exist, Lenin insisted, “we shall inevitably have to march separately,
but we can strike together more than once, and particularly now” amid the
revolutionary insurgency.17 History also shows us that, to the extent that
practical experience eliminates fundamental differences, it becomes possible for
different forces to come together into a single organization, with very positive
results. This was the case at certain points in revolutionary Russia and in many
other instances.
It appears that circumstances in Australia today may be contributing to some
groups going beyond simply a “fighting unity” toward the achievement of an
organizational unity that could greatly strengthen the efforts of revolutionary
socialists. This experience is very exciting, and it is being watched and will
provide invaluable lessons for revolutionaries in other countries.

Principled Flexibility
Related to this, it is worth noting another essential element in Lenin’s
methodology—the way he combined an insistence on the clarity of basic
principles (those of revolutionary Marxism) with what might be called a
principled flexibility. More than one person, including severe critics who knew
him well among the Mensheviks, was struck by his extreme disinclination to
make a show of his own knowledge, and by his deep desire to learn from others
—especially fellow revolutionary activists, workers, and peasants. He
understood that one must be able to listen and learn from those one wishes to
teach, and that the development of knowledge is interactive and collective. He
even learned from political opponents—the British liberal J. A. Hobson
powerfully influenced his book Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
anarchists influenced his classic The State and Revolution, the populists of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party influenced him enough to cause him to steal their
agrarian program of land to the peasants, and during the revolutionary upsurge of
1905 he scolded some Bolshevik comrades more drawn to revolutionary rhetoric
than to practical workers’ struggles, saying: “Take a lesson from the Mensheviks,

18
for Christ’s sake!”18
In more than one way, Lenin’s theoretical approach was not a closed system
but rather what can be called an open Marxism. He called it a guide to action,
emphasizing that reality is always much more complex, vibrant, and
multicolored than theory can ever be, and that theory must continually be
developed and renewed through the engagement with actual political struggle
and experience. That is the kind of Marxism we need in order to comprehend the
rapidly evolving capitalism of our time, and the multifaceted and fluid realities
of working-class life and experience. This involves dramatic shifts and
fluctuations in regard to working-class occupations and the labor process, and
the proletarianization of large swaths of the labor force not traditionally
perceived of as “working class.” It also involves the interplay of class with
ethnicity, race, gender, religion, culture, and more. Lenin’s approach helps to
orient us to the amazing dynamics of globalization, and to understand that issues
often perceived as “identity politics” are inseparable from class politics. This
comes through in the famous passage in What Is to Be Done?, which is worth
reminding ourselves of again and again:
The Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people,
who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears,
no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these
manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is
able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist
convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-
historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.19

This remains as true now as it was a hundred years ago.

The Centrality of Democracy

It also dovetails with the centrality of democracy to the working-class struggle
for socialism that Lenin was emphasizing two years before the Bolshevik
Revolution. It is also worth quoting at length, because it helps to define what we
must be doing today in the struggle for socialism in our own century:
The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to
 democracy and by linking with each step of its struggle democratic demands formulated in the
most resolute terms. . . . We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a
revolutionary programme and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular
election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While
capitalism exists, these demands—all of them—can only be accomplished as an exception, and
even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already
achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of
capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the
poverty of the masses and for the complete and all-round institution of all democratic reforms.
Some of these reforms will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, others in the
course of that overthrow, and still others after it. The social revolution is not a single battle but a
period covering a series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic reform,
which are consummated only by the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this
final aim that we must formulate every one of our democratic demands in a consistently
revolutionary way. It is quite conceivable that the workers of some particular country will
overthrow the bourgeoisie before even a single fundamental democratic reform has been fully
achieved. It is, however, quite inconceivable that the proletariat, as a historical class, will be able
to defeat the bourgeoisie, unless it is prepared for that by being educated in the spirit of the most
consistent and resolutely revolutionary democracy.20

The centrality of democracy in the struggle for socialism applies not only in
the social and political struggles within society but also in the internal structure
and practice of the socialist organization itself. In my book Lenin and the
Revolutionary Party and in other places, I have written a great deal on the actual
meaning and practice of the concept of “democratic centralism”—what Lenin
defined as full freedom of discussion and unity in action, and others have written
about as well. It has been documented that the Bolshevik organization had a
considerable degree of internal democracy. We have already noted here how this
changed dramatically under the rule of Joseph Stalin. That was a disastrous
development largely rooted in the devastation and isolation of Soviet Russia in
the midst of the civil war years, combined with the extreme economic
backwardness and poverty of the Russian economy. This resulted in what were
supposed to be emergency measures that, in fact, became permanent—which
eliminated any genuine democracy in the Soviet Union, and also eliminated
genuine internal democracy in all communist parties controlled by the Stalin
leadership.
Internal Culture and Cadre Development
What we have found even among all too many anti-Stalinist organizations
committed to revolutionary socialism are—in the name of Leninism and
“democratic centralism”—practices that cut across the possibility of the kind of
internal democracy that seems to have existed, historically, in Lenin’s
organization. Such internal democracy is one feature that made it possible for the
Bolsheviks to be the kind of revolutionary force that triumphed in 1917. One of
the reasons for the disappointing absence of that kind of democracy in many
relatively small socialist groups in later years may have to do with a flaw in their
self-conception. Some function more or less as sects, creating their own political
universe that involves a self-conception that they constitute the “revolutionary
vanguard” (or the politically correct nucleus around which a vanguard must
form). The hope for the future is often seen as preserving the authority and
ideological purity of this precious organization. This can engender ideological
and organizational rigidities that distort the way that democratic centralism
(particularly “full freedom of discussion”) might be understood and practiced.
If our self-conception is that we do not yet have a revolutionary party (not
even in embryo), and that our purpose is to help create the preconditions that
might make the emergence of such a party possible, this could encourage a
different kind of internal practice, in some ways matching the way we would be
dealing with those outside of our group. A primary goal would be to generate
more and more thought, experience, and creativity among one’s comrades and
others, as activists are working together in order to bring into being a force that
can successfully challenge capitalism. There are indications, in fact, that such an
extended pre-party process—even in underground conditions—existed through
the 1890s and early 1900s among Marxist-oriented revolutionaries, creating a
subculture that nurtured a genuine internal democracy as the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party (and its Bolshevik faction) finally took shape.
One of the revolutionaries-in-the-making from that time, Eugenia Levitskaya,
later reminisced: “Turning over in my mind the mass of comrades with whom I
had occasion to meet, I cannot recall a single reprehensible, contemptible act, a
single deception or lie. There was friction. There were factional differences of
opinion. But no more than that. Somehow everyone looked after himself
morally, became better and more gentle in that friendly family.” (This sense of
things can be found in a different context many years later, when the veteran
revolutionary James P. Cannon commented: “The true art of being a socialist
consists in anticipating the socialist future; in not waiting for its actual
realization, but in striving here and now, insofar as the circumstances of class
society permit, to live like a socialist; to live under capitalism according to the
higher standards of a socialist future.”) A vibrant elaboration of this comradely
subculture among Russian revolutionaries comes through in Maxim Gorky’s
novel of 1906, entitled Mother: “The purest in heart, the finest in mind are
moving against evil and trampling falsehood underfoot.” A central figure in this
subculture, Lenin wrote in What Is to Be Done? about the organizational ideal of
1902 as “a close and compact body of comrades in which complete, mutual
confidence prevails.” Even amid the fierce polemical controversies among the
Russian Communists in 1920, Lenin quoted Trotsky—with whom he was then in
sharp disagreement—that “ideological struggle within the Party does not mean
mutual ostracism but mutual influence.”21
One of the most important elements in this subculture, I think, should be an
inclusiveness that persistently and insistently works to overcome, in the
revolutionary organization, the divisive oppressions of racism, sexism,
heterosexism, and other destructive dynamics blighting human relationships in
the larger society. At times this may generate painful tensions and conflicts.
Scrupulously democratic process, combined with considerable thoughtfulness
and sensitivity, will be needed to help maintain balance and cohesion as the
organization works frankly and seriously toward fruitful results.
Such a general subculture contributes to the realization of a primary task for
any revolutionary organization worth its salt—the development of durable
cadres. By this term cadre I am referring to experienced activists, educated in
political theory, analytically oriented, with practical organizational skills, who
are able to attract new and train new members of the revolutionary organization,
and also to contribute to expanding efforts in broader movements for social
change. This means knowing something of the history of the class struggle and
of broad liberation struggles, knowing the economic and political realities of
society, knowing how to size up a situation, knowing how to interact with others
to help communicate that knowledge to them, knowing how to organize
meetings and political actions. Such qualities need to be developed among
increasing numbers of people. The proliferation of such durable cadres is
essential for all the life-giving struggles leading up to the possibility of socialist
revolution.

Taking Power to Bring About Socialism

Lenin’s thought, as Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács emphasized nine decades
back, was infused by a sense of “the actuality of revolution,” which would be
essential in establishing (as Lukács put it) “firm guide-lines for all questions on
the daily agenda, whether they were political or economic, involved theory or
tactics, agitation or organization.”22 That is to say, Lenin was concerned in all of
his political thinking and activity with the question of what it would take—
actually—to take power. Not rhetorically or theoretically, but in fact, and then to
do exactly that. Everything else we do politically must be geared to realizing that
primary purpose.
I want to conclude with two additional notions on what may need to be done
by a revolutionary party that really intends to implement the revolutionary-
democratic approach for bringing about socialism that we saw Lenin laying out
in the long quotation about democratic struggles offered a few minutes ago in
this presentation. One notion has to do with ways that practical struggles in the
here and now can be integrated into a strategy for the working class to take
power. The other notion involves defining a bit more specifically what the
socialism we are struggling for would look like, in order to help guide the
practical struggles of today and tomorrow.
The “Old Bolshevik” strategic orientation that Lenin developed with his
comrades involved the notion that a worker-peasant alliance would bring about
the democratic revolution that would overthrow monarchist oppression and clear
the way for an effective struggle for socialism. This was popularized into
political agitation and mobilization around three demands: (1) an eight-hour
workday for workers, (2) land redistribution for the peasants, and (3) a
constituent assembly to establish a democratic republic. These came to be known
as “the three whales of Bolshevism”—based on the popular Russian folktale that
the world is balanced on the backs of three whales.23
What are the “three whales” of your own revolutionary perspective in
Australia and ours in the United States? What is the strategic orientation that
could bring the working class to power in society today, and how can this be
expressed in popular and practical struggles in the here and now, in a way that
can capture the imaginations of masses of people? Finding answers to such
questions is a challenge facing revolutionary socialists of each and every country
in the twenty-first century.
Other guidelines for the practical struggles of today and tomorrow need to be
provided by the question of what the socialism we are struggling for would
actually look like. It has become a tradition for Marxists to scoff, proudly and
indignantly, that we cannot provide “utopian blueprints” of the future society,
and there is validity to this. But it seems to me that present-day realities are
eroding that validity.
For decades we have been treated to the spectacle of parties claiming to be
socialist coming to power (or at least being voted into office) and then—in
contradiction to their stated goals—carrying out so-called realistic policies
designed to salvage and maintain one or another version of actually existing
capitalism. In some cases, this is combined with implementing welfare-state
social reforms; in other cases, it is combined with slashing previously
implemented welfare-state reforms. Do we intend to do better than that? If so,
we need to figure out how, and be able explain that to those whose mass support
will be needed to make it so.24
If there is an alternative to the present impasse of capitalism, and to
capitalism itself, we need to be able to say—quite specifically—what that would
look like and, with at least some key specifics, how it would be done. It would
involve a society free from poverty and unemployment, with decent education
and health care and housing for all, with a secure economic infrastructure
(including mass transit systems), and the elimination of air and water pollution,
and of the destructive use of our natural resources. It would involve liberty and
justice for all, with the free development of each person being the condition for
the free development of all. This would involve an economic democracy, to
ensure that society’s economic resources would be utilized to make these
proposed changes a reality.
Such things can be explained in ways that highlight how they can actually be
carried out, based on real-world specifics. This can, in turn, provide the basis for
immediate struggles—struggles whose beginning is in our present-day capitalist
society, but whose end will take us beyond that framework to the future of
genuine democracy and freedom. The socialism that we want can be embedded
in the struggles of today and the victories of tomorrow. Some may see this
approach as being somewhat akin to Leon Trotsky’s “Transitional Program,”
although in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels seem to have sketched a
similar approach, suggesting:
In the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of
property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which
appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement,
outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a
means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.25
 The challenge for us is to get increasingly specific and practical about the
socialist alternative to capitalism, building organizations and movements that
can develop mass consciousness and mass struggles capable of bringing about
that alternative. That’s the point of what we’re doing—the actuality of
revolution, the culmination of what so many of us, so many of our brothers and
sisters, have been struggling for over so many years, a socialist future to be
created in the twenty-first century.
NOTES

Chapter 3
1. Tom Stoppard, Travesties (New York: Grove Press, 1975, 1993), 60. One
could say that there is another serious political revolutionary in the play—
Lenin’s wife and comrade, Nadezhda Krupskaya—though her function in the
play is basically to recount what Lenin thought and did.
2. On the recent revival at Princeton, see www.mccarter.org/travesties
/index.html, and the post-performance panel discussion,
www.mccarter.org/travesties/pages/conversation.html. On the other plays, see
Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (New York: Grove Press, 2007); Tom
Stoppard, Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Grove Press, 2007).
3. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of
History (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 458.
4. Maxim Gorky, “V. I. Lenin,” in Lenin and Gorky: Letters, Reminiscences,
Articles (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 255, 271 (with a slight
modification in translation). For fierce criticism of Lenin and his comrades,
see Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and
the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
5. Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1964), 149. (A slight modification in translation was made
here.)
6. Two recent and excellent accounts of Marx and his ideas can be found in
Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a
Revolution (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2011) and Terry Eagleton, Why
Marx Was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). An early
 documented account of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, more or less
corroborated by later scholarship, can be found in William Henry
Chamberlin’s 1935 work The Russian Revolution, 191–1921, 2 vols.
(Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1987). Early journalistic
accounts of Stalin’s tyranny, more or less corroborated by later scholarship,
can be found in William Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age (Boston: Little Brown
and Co., 1934) and Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937).
7. Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994), 64; Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide:
Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2009), 14, 186, 187, 188; the journalistic comment that Codrescu challenges
can be found in Arthur Ransome, Russia in 1919 (New York: B. W. Huebsch,
1919), 122. A challenge to the view that “Lenin perverted Marxism” can be
found in Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009) and Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political
Thought: Theory and Practice in the Democratic and Socialist Revolutions
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009). Challenges to the conceptualization of
Lenin as a mass murderer can be found in Moshe Lewin,
Russia/USSR/Russia: The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York:
Pantheon, 1995) and Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (London: Verso,
2005). Of course, any head of state in time of war (including Winston
Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and others) can be characterized as a mass
murderer, though it is not clear that this is Codrescu’s meaning.
8. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 251; Hannah Arendt quoted in Elisabeth Young-
Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1982), 411; Whittaker Chambers, “The End of a Dark Age
Ushers in New Dangers,” Life, April 30, 1956, reprinted in Ghosts on the
Roof, Selected Essays, ed. Terry Teachout (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
 Publishers, 1996), 280. Similar points emerge in a classic anthology of
informed anticommunist writings, Verdict of Three Decades: From the
Literature of Individual Revolt Against Soviet Communism: 1917–1950, ed.
Julien Steinberg (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), and in the study
by George F. Kennan, scholarly and acute US Ambassador to Soviet Russia in
the time of Stalin: Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (New York:
New American Library, 1962). For much information relevant to these
questions, see the magisterial study by Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence
and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000). Indispensible are two volumes by Robert C. Tucker
—Stalin as Revolutionary: 1879–1929 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992) and
Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1992). Also see Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary
Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of
Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006) from which some of the material
in this discussion is drawn.
9. Stefan T. Possony, Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., 1964), vii, 392. A more recent study consistent with this is
Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Basic Books,
2010), interweaving considerable research with political hostility and
personal denigration. For what strike me as more reliable biographies, see
Ronald W. Clark, Lenin: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1988),
and Lars T. Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion, 2011).
10. A classic articulation of the conservative outlook can be found in Russell
Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Chicago: Henry Regnery
Co., 1960). On Possony’s elitism and racism, see Nathaniel Weyl and Stefan
Possony, The Geography of Intellect (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963),
144, 147, 266, 267, 268, 271, 288, 289.
11. Leon Trotsky, On Lenin (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1971), 166–67;
Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, 243.
12. Carter Elwood, The Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the Development of the
Bolshevik Party 1910–1914 (London: Anthem Press, 2011), xiv, xvii, xviii.
13. Isaac Don Levine, The Man Lenin (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924), 13,
36, 157, 160, 176.
14. Ibid., 179, 192, 193. For more on Lenin’s personal life, see Tamara
Deutscher, Not by Politics Alone: The Other Lenin (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1973).
15. John Fleming, Stoppard’s Theatre: Finding Order Amid Chaos (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001), 118, 119; Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform:
A Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (New York: Octogon Press,
1972),146; Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1975), 148.
16. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, On Culture and Cultural Revolution (Honolulu, HI:
University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 247, 233, 234.
17. Gorky, Untimely Thoughts, 268; Trotsky, On Lenin, 165; Anatoly
Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967),
41; Clare Sheridan, Mayfair to Moscow—Clare Sheridan’s Diary (New York:
Boni and Liveright, 1921), 120.
18. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, 244.
19. For more on Lenin’s perspectives, see V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy,
Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008)
and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 1993). Also see the slideshow on Lenin (along with
slideshows on Marxism, Leon, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg):
http://getpoliticalnow.com/political-lives/.
20. See for example, the reportage and reflections of BBC journalist Paul
Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
(London: Verso, 2012).
21. For example, Stoppard makes fun (appropriately) of Lenin’s desperate but
sometimes absurd schemes for getting back into Russia as the anti-tsarist
 revolution is unfolding—and at one point, in an attempt to develop a disguise,
he puts on a curly blond wig. It might make sense, and be more in character,
for Lenin and Krupskaya themselves to burst into laughter (joining in the
audience’s mirth) at such silliness.

Chapter 4
1. Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London/New York:
Routledge, 2005), 284; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin
Books, 1990), 65.
2. Some of the debate can be found online though Links: International Journal
of Socialist Renewal, http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/665.
3. Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 3 (Bloomington, IN: University of
Indiana Press, 1995), 323; Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 493.
4. Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Basic Books,
2010), ix, 217–18, 219, 221, 306, 355.
5. Carter Elwood, The Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the Development of the
Bolshevik Party 1910–1914 (London/New York: Anthem Press, 2011).
6. This new point, along with much else, is challenged in a fine and appreciative
review by Lars Lih, “The Non-Geometric Elwood,” Canadian Slavonic
Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 74, nos. 1–2, March–June/mars–juin,
2012, 45–73.
7. Katy Turton, Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian
Revolution, 1864–1937 (London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2, 4,
19–23, 26, 27.
8. Philip Pomper, Lenin’s Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 205, 206, 207.
9. Beryl Williams, Lenin (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000), 205–06.
10. James D. White, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution (Houndmills,
 UK: Palgrave, 2001), 202.
11. The outstanding work on Lenin and religion is Roland Boer, Lenin, Religion
and Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
12. Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, 171.
13. Ibid., 29. Something akin to this notion emerged in the later writings of one
of the most important witnesses of and participants in the history we are
studying, Victor Serge (who does not, however, simply reject the Bolshevik-
Leninist ideals to which he committed much of his life). See, for example, the
new and restored edition of his rich and illuminating Memoirs of a
Revolutionary (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), 155–58, and
one of his last articles, “The Socialist Imperative,” Partisan Review 14, no. 5
(September–October, 1947). Also see Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The
Course Is Set on Hope (London: Verso, 2001), 47–49, 267–77.
14. Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, 59, 61, 62, 63.
15. Ibid., 128, 207, 234.
16. Ibid., 66, 73, 146, 148, 87, 190.
17. Ibid., 78, 93, 190–91.
18. Ibid., 148, 168, 169.
19. Ibid., 146, 225.
20. Ibid., 174.
21. V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, Selected Writings, ed. Paul
Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 279–80.
22. Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, 208.
23. Ibid., 200, 251.
24. Ibid., 291, 288.
25. Lars Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion, 2011), 13.
26. Ibid., 203, 205.
27. Ibid., 13.
28. D. S. Mirsky, Lenin (London: Holme Press, 1931), 192; Paul Le Blanc,
“Lenin’s Marxism,” Platypus Review, May 2011 (http://platypus1917.org
 /2011/05/05/lenin%E2%80%99s-marxism); Le Blanc, Lenin and the
Revolutionary Party; David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An
Introduction to Their Lives and Work (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1974); August H. Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the
Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2000). August Nimtz, in a critical review of Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered, “A
Return to Lenin—But Without Marx and Engels?,” Science & Society,
October 2009, argues that Lenin’s primary inspiration was Marx, not Kautsky.
The seeming distance between Nimtz and Lih narrowed as their agreement on
the primacy of Marx (not Kautsky) for Lenin became clear, and with their
agreement that after 1914 Lenin continued to respect the pre-1910 Kautsky.
29. Lih, Lenin, 13, 15.
30. Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, 291.

Chapter 5
1. Paul Le Blanc, “Introduction: Ten Reasons for Not Reading Lenin,” in
Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 63, 65. Examples of the anti-Lenin
interpretation can be found in Bertram D. Wolfe, Lenin and the Twentieth
Century (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1984); Leonard Schapiro, The
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: Vintage Books, 1960);
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1991).
Also see an early salvo in the current scholarly critique of this interpretation
in Lars T. Lih, “How a Founding Document Was Found, or One Hundred
Years of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 5–49.
2. Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of
Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
3. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Signet Books, 1967),
 114.
4. N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International
Publishers, 1979), 96, 205, 211, 229.
5. Reed, Ten Days, 256.
6. N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 279–80, 289.
7. Albert Rhys Williams, Lenin: The Man and His Work (New York: Scott and
Seltzer, 1919), 45, 48; Albert Rhys Williams, Journey into Revolution:
Petrograd, 1917–1918 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), 51, 62.
8. N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), 63, 65.
9. Gregory Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party from the Beginnings to
February 1917: A Popular Outline (London: New Park Publications, 1973),
78.
10. V. I. Lenin, “Urgent Tasks of Our Movement,” in Collected Works, vol. 4
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 370–71.
11. Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context
(Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006).
12. Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1926), 159–60. Compare this to Eric Hobsbawm’s more
recent reflection in The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991
(New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 76: “The force of the movements for
world revolution lay in the communist form of organization, Lenin’s ‘party of
a new type,’ a formidable innovation of twentieth-century social engineering,
comparable to the invention of Christian monastic and other orders of the
Middle Ages. It gave even small organizations disproportionate effectiveness
because the party could command extraordinary devotion and self-sacrifice
from its members, more than military discipline and cohesiveness, and a total
concentration on carrying out party decisions at all costs.” He adds that the
success of such organizations, as revolutionary parties, “depends on what
 happens among the masses.”
13. Soma Marik, Reinterrogating the Classical Marxist Discourses of
Revolutionary Democracy (Delhi, India: Aakar, 2008), 289.
14. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-
Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1999), 11.
15. Williams, Journey into Revolution, 326–27; Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in
Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1992), 8, 65.
16. Alan Adler, ed., Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four
Congresses of the Third International (London: Ink Links, 1980), 235.
17. See, for example, Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Three
Volumes in One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936). A survey of later
social history consistent with such an analytical narrative can be found in
Ronald G. Suny, “Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,”
American Historical Review 88, no. 1 (February 1983). A fine piece of recent
scholarship, Kevin Murphy’s Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class
Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005),
extends this mode of analysis into the post-revolutionary period.
18. An important, if one-sided, contribution on this tragic evolution can be found
in Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24: Soviet Workers
and the New Communist Elite (London: Routledge, 2008), but also see Paul
Le Blanc, “Bolshevism and Revolutionary Democracy,” New Politics, Winter
2009.
19. Isaac Steinberg, Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist (Freeport, NY: Books
for Libraries Press, 1971), 235–36. For detailed documentation, see George
Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1981).
20. Albert Rhys Williams, Through the Russian Revolution (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1967), 276–77, 278.
21. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London: Writers and Readers,
1984), 132–33.
22. Lenin’s comments are gathered together in Paul Le Blanc, From Marx to
Gramsci: A Reader in Revolutionary Marxist Politics (Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 1996), 59; and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary
Party (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1993), 341–42.
23. Leon Trotsky, “The New Course,” in The Challenge of the Left Opposition,
1923–25, ed. Naomi Allen (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), 127, 134–35.
24. Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1972), 60–61.
25. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 8.
26. Leon Trotsky, “What Next?” in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany,
ed. George Breitman and Merry Maisel (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971),
213.
27. Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of
Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 133–34. Also see Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, ed., The Ryutin
Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship, Platform of
the “Union of Marxists-Leninists” (Kolkata, India: Seribaan, 2010).
28. Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (London: Verso, 2005), 308.
29. Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the “Second
Revolution” (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 119.
30. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of
Stalinism, Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);
Vadim Z. Rogovin, 1937, Stalin’s Year of Terror (Oak Park, MI: Mehring
Books, 1998) and Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the
USSR (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2009); Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and
Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
31. On “Western Marxism,” see Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western
 Marxism (London: Verso, 1979). Gramsci’s political writings and prison
notebooks up to the 1930s stand together with four works stretching from
1923 to 1929 by Lukács as outstanding additions to an authentic Leninism.
For Gramsci, see Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920 (New York:
International Publishers, 1977), Selections from Political Writings 1921–1926
(New York: International Publishers, 1978), and Selections from the Prison
Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971); for Lukács, see
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1971), Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), A Defence of “History and Class
Consciousness”—Tailism and the Dialectic (London Verso, 2000), and “Blum
Theses, 1928–1929,” in Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays, 1919–1929
(New York: Harper and Row, 1973). The works of Trotsky also fit into this
category—a valuable survey can be found in Kunal Chattopadhyay, The
Marxism of Leon Trotsky (Kolkata, India: Progressive Publishers, 2006). An
immense if imperfect chronicle can be found in Robert J. Alexander,
International Trotskyism 1929–1985: A Documented Analysis of the
Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), but also see the
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line
(http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/index.htm) and Bill Dunn and Hugo
Radice, eds., 100 Years of Permanent Revolution, Results and Prospects
(London: Pluto Press, 2006).
32. This is discussed further in Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin’s Return,” WorkingUSA:
The Journal of Labor and Society 10, no. 3 (August 2007): 273–85.

Chapter 6
1. See Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin’s Return,” and also my introductory essay “Ten
Reasons for Not Reading Lenin,” in V. I. Lenin: Revolution, Democracy,
Socialism; Selected Writings, ed. Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008),
 3–80.
2. Most of the relevant material in the debate can be found through Links:
International Journal of Socialist Renewal,
http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/665.
3. Despite problems in Pham’s methodology, he usefully drew attention to the
fact that Lenin did not have the intention, in 1912, of creating the “party of a
new type” attributed to him by many—for example, P. N. Pospelov et al.,
Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 82, 189–91, and
Bertram D. Wolfe, “A Party of a New Type,” in Lenin and the Twentieth
Century: A Bertram D. Wolfe Retrospective, ed. Lennard D. Gerson (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1984), 12–41.
4. Material relevant to this can be found in: Paul Le Blanc, From Marx to
Gramsci (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), especially 2–23;
Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism in Our Time,” in Marxism in Our Time (San
Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971), 15–30; Victor Kiernan, “History,” in Marx:
The First Hundred Years, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, UK: Fontana
Paperbacks, 1983), 57–102; Eric Hobsbawm, “Marx and History,” New Left
Review 1, no.143 (January–February 1984); Ernest Mandel, The Place of
Marxism in History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996); Terry
Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2011).
5. For interesting and informative discussions on the discipline of history, see:
Edward Hallet Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961);
Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000);
Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of
History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
6. See extensive discussion and documentation in Paul Le Blanc, “The Lenin
Wars: Over a Cliff with Lars Lih,” Links, February 12, 2012,
http://links.org.au/node/2752.
7. Lars Lih, “A Faction Is Not a Party,” Weekly Worker, May 3, 2012,
 http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004820; for the article on
1912, see Paul Le Blanc, “The Birth of the Bolshevik Party in 1912,” Links,
April 17, 2012, http://links.org.au/node/2832.
8. Christopher Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (London/New York:
Routledge, 2005), 78.
9. Rosa Luxemburg, “Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy,” in The
Rosa Luxemburg Reader, Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson, eds. (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004), 269, 272, 273.
10. Lars Lih, “Bolshevism and Revolutionary Social Democracy,” Weekly
Worker 917, June 7, 2012, http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article
_id=1004864.
11. These points are made in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
(Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996), 360, 372.
12. Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, 226. A faulty interpretation of this last
quote, in my opinion, is presented in Paul Kellogg, “Leninism: It’s Not What
You Think,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal,
http://links.org.au/node/1407, which has Lenin dismissing a presumably
bungled and dogmatic text on party organizational principles, allegedly
adopted by the Communist International due to the highhandedness of
Gregory Zinoviev, a document that, we are told, Lenin himself had no hand in
writing. In fact, Lenin actively assisted Otto Kuusinen in the drafting of the
document and was very supportive of it— see Aino Kuusinen, The Rings of
Destiny: Inside Soviet Russia from Lenin to Brezhnev (New York: William
Morrow and Co., 1974), 37, and Lenin’s letters to Otto Kuusinen and
Wilhelm Koenen in Collected Works, vol. 42 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1971), 316–19, and to Gregory Zinoviev in Collected Works, vol. 45
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, Publishers), 185–86. Also see John Riddell,
ed., Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the
Communist International, 1922 (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012), 303–305. My
own quite different interpretation of the material Kellogg deals with can be
 found in Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, 316–17.
13. Carter Elwood, “Lenin and Pravda, 1912–1914,” in Carter Elwood, The
Non-Geometric Lenin: Essays on the Development of the Bolshevik Party
1910–1914 (London/New York: Anthem Press, 2011), 37–55. For a fine
review of this volume, see Lars T. Lih, “The Non-Geometric Elwood,”
Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 54, nos. 1–2,
March–June/mars–juin, 2012, 45–73.
14. Quoted in Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–1929 (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1978), 51.
15. N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International
Publishers, 1970), 89.
16. Kamenev quoted in Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, 19.
17. Lars Lih, Lenin (London Reaktion, 2011), 188; Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary
Life, 208.
18. Isaac Deutscher, “Marxism and Nonviolence,” in Marxism in Our Time, 86.
Also see Read, Lenin: A Revolutionary Life, 246–55, and Arno J. Mayer, The
Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
19. Among sources useful for this effort are: Alexander Rabinowitch, The
Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2007); Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (London:
Writers and Readers, 1984), especially 70–243; the somewhat counterposed
studies of Simon Pirani, The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920–24 (New
York: Routledge, 2008) and Kevin Murphy, Revolution and
Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2007); Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York:
Vintage Books, 1970); V. I. Lenin, Lenin’s Final Fight, Speeches and Writings
1922–23, ed. George Fyson (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995).
20. C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1962), 35.
Chapter 7
1. Charles Post, “Lenin Reconsidered,” International Viewpoint, November 3,
2011, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2361. Available
on ESSF (article 23384), “Lenin Reconsidered,” http://www .europe-
solidaire.org/spip.php?article23384.
2. Ibid.
3. Ernest Mandel, “The Leninist Theory of Organization: Its Relevance for
Today,” in Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century:
Collected Essays, ed. Steve Bloom (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1994); also see the online version at http://www.marxists
.org/archive/mandel/196x/leninism/index.htm.
4. Post, “Lenin Reconsidered.”
5. Ibid.
6. Mandel, “The Leninist Theory of Organization,” in Revolutionary Marxism
and Social Reality, Bloom, 91.
7. Ernest Mandel, The Place of Marxism in History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1996); also see online version at http://www.marxists
.org/archive/mandel/19xx/marx-hist/index.htm.
8. Valentino Gerratana, “Stalin, Lenin and ‘Leninism,’” New Left Review 101,
May–June 1977, newleftreview.org/I/103/valentine-gerrantna-stalin-lenin-
and-leninism.
9. Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, eds., Witnesses to Permanent Revolution:
The Documentary Record (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011) and Richard B.
Day and Daniel F. Gaido, eds. Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to
World War I (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
10. Relevant texts from Mandel can be found in endnotes 2 and 5 above. On
others, see: Ernst Fischer and Franz Marek, The Essential Lenin (New York:
Seabury Press, 1972); Antonio Gramsci, “Leader” (1924), in Selections from
Political Writings 1921–26, ed. by Quinton Hoare (New York: International
 Publishers, 1978); Antonio Gramsci, “The Modern Prince,” in Selections from
the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(New York: International Publishers, 1971); Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study in
the Unity of His Thought, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 2009); Leon
Trotsky, Writings from Exile, ed. by Kunal Chattopadhyay and Paul Le Blanc
(London: Pluto Press).
11. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings,
ed. Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 59–61.
12. Charles Post, “What Is Left of Leninism? New European Left Parties in
Historical Perspective,” Socialist Register 2013: The Question of Strategy, ed.
Leo Panitch, Gregory Albo, and Vivek Chibber (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2012).
13. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
(New York: Vintage, 1989).

Chapter 8
1. For background on Marx and Marxism consistent with what is presented here,
see: Phil Gasper, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto:
A Road Map to History’s Most Important Political Document (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2005); Paul Le Blanc, From Marx to Gramsci (Amherst,
NY: Humanity Books, 1996); Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); August Nimtz, Marx and Engels:
Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2000).
2. Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 137,
168; Zetkin’s recollection of Luxemburg’s remarks in Ronald W. Clark,
Lenin: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 135.
3. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966), 357.
4. Hannah Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg, 1870–1919,” in Men in Dark Times (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 41, 43, 44, 45, 54. Levitskaya
quoted in Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of a Man and His Influence
(New York: Stein and Day, 1967), 54.
5. Gorky quoted in Clark, Lenin: A Biography, 135; Georg Adler, Peter Hudis,
Annelies Laschitza, eds., The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Verso,
2011), 298.
6. See Rosa Luxemburg, The National Question, Selected Writings, ed. Horace
B. Davis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Michael Löwy,
Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question (London:
Pluto Press, 1998); and Omar Dahbour and Michelene R. Ishay, eds., The
Nationalism Reader (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995), especially 198–
214, 322–72.
7. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003);
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism—A Popular Outline
(New York: International Publishers, 1974); V. I. Lenin, Letter to L. B.
Kamenev (March 1913), Collected Works, vol. 35 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1973), 94. See discussion by Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 150–63, and in Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg,
vol. 2, 828–41.
8. Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, in Kenneth J.
Tarbuck, ed., The Accumulation of Capital—An Anti-Critique by Rosa
Luxemburg and Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital by Nikolai
Bukharin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 268; Roman Rosdolsky,
The Making of Marx’s “Capital,” 2 vols. (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 72;
Ernest Mandel, “Introduction,” in Marx, Capital, Volume Two, 68. For two
lucid and succinct efforts to draw together the various components of Marx’s
three-volume work, seeking to demonstrate (in contrast to Luxemburg) that
they form a coherent and satisfactory whole, see Ben Fine and Alredo Saad-
Filho, Marx’s Capital, 5th ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2010) and Michael
 Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). Lenin’s marginal notes to The
Accumulation of Capital are quoted in Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2, 533;
Arendt, “Rosa Luxemburg, 1870–1919,” 40.
9. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2, 532.
10. On the Bolshevik split, see Paul Le Blanc, “The Birth of the Bolshevik Party
in 1912,” Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal, April 17, 2012,
http://links.org.au/node/2832. On Luxemburg’s critical reaction, see Rosa
Luxemburg, “Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy,” in The Rosa
Luxemburg Reader Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson, eds. (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2004), 266–80.
11. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organizational Question of Social Democracy,” in Rosa
Luxemburg Speaks, Mary-Alice Waters, ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1970), 128–29. On flaws in Luxemburg’s analysis (and the considerable
common ground existing between her approach and Lenin’s), see Paul Le
Blanc, “Luxemburg and Lenin on Organization,” in Rosa Luxemburg,
Reflections and Writings, Paul Le Blanc, ed. (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books,
1999), 81–102, and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
(Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1993), 79–87.
12. The criticism of Luxemburg can be found in V. I. Lenin, “Fine Words: Butter
No Parsnips,” Collected Works, vol. 8 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962),
61. Lenin’s own discussion of “organization-as-process” can be found in
“Preface to the Collection Twelve Years” (1908) in Collected Works, vol. 13
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 94–113, and Left-Wing Communism:
An Infantile Disorder (1920), in V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy,
Socialism, Selected Writings, ed. Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008),
305–12.
13. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions
in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, 200.
14. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 138.
15. V. I. Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-
Determination,” in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 233–34.
16. Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks,
389, 391, 394.
17. Ibid., 369, 375.
18. V. I. Lenin, “Notes of a Publicist,” Collected Works, Vol. 33 (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1973), 210. It is worth noting that Lenin was of the
opinion that the platform of the Communist International should be based on
the program of the Russian Communist Party and also on the program written
for the Spartacus League by Rosa Luxemburg. See Gerda and Hermann
Weber, Lenin: Life and Works (London: Macmillan Press, 1980), 154.
19. August Thalheimer, “Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin” (1930), Marxist Internet
Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/rosa.htm. Also
see Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, “Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg,” in
Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Paul
Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 3–35.

Chapter 9
1. V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. Paul Le
Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 306.
2. See Paul Le Blanc, Work and Struggle: Voices from U.S. Labor Radicalism
(New York: Routledge, 2011), 33.
3. There are many places that these lyrics can be found, including online at
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever.
4. Quoted in Le Blanc, Work and Struggle, 39.
5. Ibid.
6. George Breitman, “The Current Radicalization Compared with Those of the
Past,” in Towards an American Socialist Revolution: A Strategy for the 1970s,
ed. Jack Barnes, George Breitman, Derrick Morrson, Barry Sheppard, Mary-
 Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 101. Also see Anthony
Marcus, ed., Malcolm X and the Third American Revolution: Selected
Writings of George Breitman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005).
7. The quote is from What Is to Be Done? See Lenin, Revolution, Democracy,
Socialism, 143.
8. Chris Hedges, “Occupy Wall Street Will Be Back,” Truthdig, June 18, 2012,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/occupy_will_be_back _20120618/.

Chapter 10
1. Alex Callinicos, “Is Leninism Finished?” Socialist Review, January, 2013,
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber =12210, and
Louis Proyect, “Leninism Is Finished: A Reply to Alex Callinicos,”
Unrepentant Marxist, January 28, 2013, http://louisproyect
.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/leninism-is-finished-a-reply-to-alex -callinicos.
2. Owen Jones, “British Politics Urgently Needs a New Force—a Movement on
the Left to Counter Capitalism’s Crisis,” Independent, January 20, 2013,
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/british -politics-urgently-
needs-a-new-force—a-movement-on-the-left-to -counter-capitalisms-crisis-
8459099.html.
3. For a massively documented account of the US SWP experience in the 1980s,
see Sarah Lovell, ed., The Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party, 1979–
1983, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fit /struggleindex.htm
and Paul Le Blanc, ed., Revolutionary Principles and Working-Class
Democracy, http://www.marxists.org/history/etol
/document/fit/revprinindex.htm, especially my introductory essay to the latter,
“Leninism in the United States and the Decline of the Socialist Workers
Party,” http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document /fit/leninismus.htm.
4. In fact, a day later Proyect posted a communication from some dissident
SWPers that approximates such formulations, in a response to Callinicos
 entitled “Is Zinovievism Finished?” Unrepentant Marxist, January 29, 2013,
and which concludes: “The time for Leninism to be tried is now long
overdue.”
5. Charles Post, “Lenin Reconsidered” (review of Lars Lih’s Lenin),
International Viewpoint, November 3, 2011,
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article2361. It seems to me
that this is challenged by a serious examination of Lenin’s thought—for
example, in V. I. Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings,
ed. Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto Press, 2008). For a response to Post, see
“The Enduring Value of Lenin’s Political Thought,” Europe Solidaire Sans
Frontières, February 8, 2012, http://www.europe-solidaire.org /spip.php?
article24495.
6. I touch on this in footnote 12 of my essay “The Great Lenin Debate—History
and Politics,” Links, September 1, 2012, criticizing an interpretation by an
excellent comrade, Paul Kellogg, which led to a clarifying interchange
between myself and Kellogg that provided substantial documentation—see
http://links.org.au/node/3011#comments.
7. Leon Trotsky, “Preface,” in The History of the Russian Revolution, Marxist
Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930 /hrr/ch00.htm.
8. Proyect sees this as being related to the experience of SYRIZA in Greece. The
meaning of SYRIZA is a focus of debate on the revolutionary left—see the
presentation of Strathis Kouvalakis, “On Tasks Facing SYRIZA,” Links,
December 10, 2012, http://links.org.au /node/3145, and Nikos Tamvlakis,
“Could SYRIZA Become a ‘New PASOK’?” International Viewpoint,
November 26, 2012, http://www .internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?
article2807.
9. Quoted in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 1993), 128, 130. The Menshevik quote is taken from Ralph
Carter Elwood, ed., Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, Vol. 1: The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, 1898–
 October 1917 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1974), 93–94. The Lenin
quote is from Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 10, 442–43.
10. Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, 130; Lenin, Collected Works,
vol. 10, 310–11.
11. Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, 131; Lenin, Collected Works,
vol. 10, 442–43.
12. “The Organizational Structure of the Communist Parties, the Methods and
Content of Their Work: Theses,” in Adler, ed., Theses, Resolutions and
Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (London:
Ink Links, 1980), 235.
13. Ibid., 234.

Chapter 11
1. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso,
2009), 13.
2. The remarkable stories of Morris Lewit and his companion Sylvia Bleecker
are told in Michael Steven Smith and Paul Le Blanc, “Morris Lewit: Pioneer
Leader of American Trotskyism (1903-1998),” and Frank Lovell, “Sylvia
Bleecker (1901-1988): Union Organizer, Socialist Agitator, and Lifelong
Trotskyist,”in Paul Le Blanc and Thomas Barrett, eds., Revolutionary Labor
Socialist: The Life, Ideas, and Comrades of Frank Lovell (Union City, NJ:
Smyrna Press, 2000), 272-301,
3. M. Stein, “Organization Report,” The Party Builder, vol. I, no. 3, December
1944, 13, 14; M. Stein, “The Organization Methods and Practices of Our
Party,” Internal Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 9, October 1944, 23.
4. M. Stein, “The Internal Party Situation, (Report Delivered at National
Convention, November 16-19, 1944),” Internal Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 13,
December 1944, 10–11. Different intrerpretations have been touched on by
Alan Wald and myself in George Breitman, Paul Le Blanc, and Alan Wald,
 Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations
(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), xi, 280.
5. V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder,” in Revolution,
Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings, ed. Paul Le Blanc (London: Pluto
Press, 2008), 306.
6. Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy, Beyond Capitalism? The Future of Radical
Politics (London: Zero Books, 2012), 152, 160.
7. James P. Cannon, “Socialist Electoral Policy (1958),” in Speeches for
Socialism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 337, 338-339.
8. James P. Cannon, “Theses on the American Revolution” and “Report on ‘The
American Theses,’” in The Struggle for the “American Century,” ed. by Les
Evans (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 289–18.
9. James P. Cannon, “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” in Speeches to the
Party (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 59, 64.

Chapter 12
1. See Paul Le Blanc, “Ten Reasons for Not Reading Lenin,” in V. I. Lenin,
Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Essays, ed. Paul Le Blanc
(London: Pluto Press, 2008), 3–80.
2. Two valuable discussions of current realities can be found in: Paul Mason,
Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London:
Verso, 2013); Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy, Beyond Capitalism? The
Future of Radical Politics (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012).
3. J. V. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism in Stalin, Problems of Leninism
(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 3; also see Stalin Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924 /foundations-
leninism/introduction.htm. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–
1929 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 313–29.
4. Riutin quoted in Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary
 Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of
Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), 133–34; Sobhanlal Datta Gupta,
ed., The Ryutin Platform, Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship:
Platform of the “Union of Marxists-Leninists” (Kolkata, India: Seribaan
Books, 2010), 138.
5. Valentino Gerratana, “Stalin, Lenin and ‘Leninism,’” New Left Review 1, no.
103, May–June 1977, newleftreview.org/I/103/valentine-gerratana -stalin-
lenin-and-leninism.
6. Le Blanc, “Ten Reasons for Not Reading Lenin,” in Lenin, Revolution,
Democracy, Socialism, 60–61.
7. Quoted in Sidney Hook, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New
York: John Day Co., 1933), 43.
8. Lars T. Lih, “Zinoviev: Populist Leninist,” in Ben Lewis and Lars T. Lih, eds.,
Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle (London: November
Publications, 2011), 40. For Luncharsky’s pen portrait, see Revolutionary
Silhouettes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 75–82.
9. Lih, 58, 59. Lih’s connection of Gramsci’s thought with that of Zinoviev
deserves critical scrutiny, but is partly corroborated in Gramsci’s 1926 letter
to Palmiro Togliatti in which he asserts: “Comrades Zinoviev, Trotsky, and
Kamenev have made powerful contributions toward educating us for the
Revolution. At times they have corrected us energetically and severely; they
have been our teachers.” The quote can be found in John M. Cammett,
Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1967), 181; for further indication of Zinoviev’s
influence, see Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual
Biography (London: Merlin, 1977), 199–202, 204, 205, 236, Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International
Publishers, 1977), 169–70, and Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment:
Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 165–67.
10. Severe criticisms by four who knew Zinoviev can be found in: Alfred
 Rosmer, Moscow Under Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 54,
83, 182, 207–09, and a passage from the Conclusion of the French edition,
quoted in Emil Fabrol, “The Prelude to Stalinism,” in Alfred Rosmer, Boris
Souvarine, Amile Fabrole, Antoine Clavez, Trotsky and the Origins of
Trotskyism (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2002), 20–21; Victor Serge,
From Lenin to Stalin (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 53–56, and
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012),
84, 132, 158, 207, 225; Franz Borkenau in World Communism (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1962), 163, 203, 227; Angelica Balabanoff, My
Life as a Rebel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 220–24,
283. Balabanoff is the most unrelentingly negative—Rosmer, Serge, and
Borkenau who knew him better and longer, convey positive qualities that
provide a more rounded portrait. For more on Zinoviev, see Georges Haupt
and Jean-Jacques Marie, Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of
Bolshevik Leaders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 95–106. For
James P. Cannon’s critique of “Cominternism,” see, “Internationalism and the
SWP” in Cannon, Speeches to the Party (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973),
67–91, and at https://
www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1953/international.htm.
11. Lars T. Lih, “The Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: The Debates of April
1917 in Context,” Russian History, 38 (2011): 200.
12. N. S. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International
Publishers, 1970), 335.
13. Ibid., 348–49.
14. Ibid., 349–51; N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal
Record (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 280–89; Raphael
R. Abramovitch, The Soviet Revolution 1917–1939 (New York: International
Universities Press, 1962), 30–32; W. S. Woytinsky, Stormy Passage: A
Personal History Through Two Russian Revolutions to Democracy and
Freedom: 1905–1960 (New York: Vanguard Press, 1961), 265–67; Alexandra
 Kollontai, The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman
(New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 31.
15. Lars Lih, “Democratic Centralism: Fortunes of a Formula,” Weekly Worker,
April 11, 2013, http://links.org.au/node/3300.
16. Lenin, “A Militant Agreement for the Uprising,” in Revolution, Democracy,
Socialism, 174, 177.
17. Ibid., 174, 179, 180.
18. Lenin quoted in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Amherst,
NY: Humanity Books, 1993), 117.
19. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 143.
20. Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-
Determination,” in Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 233–34.
21. Levitskaya quoted in Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His
Influence (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), 53–54; James P. Cannon, “Happy
Birthday, Arne Swabeck” (delivered in 1953), Cannon Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1953 /hbaswab.htm; Maxim
Gorky, Mother (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 344; for Lenin quote from
What Is to Be Done?, see Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, 53;
Lenin quoting Trotsky in “Once Again on the Trade Unions” (1921) in Lenin
Internet Archive,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jan/25.htm.
22. Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso,
2009), 11–13.
23. Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, 182.
24. For the United States, an initial (perhaps preliminary) effort in this direction
is offered by Francis Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith, eds.,
Imagine!: Living in a Socialist USA (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).
25. This point is emphasized in Cooper and Hardy, Beyond Capitalism? The
Future of Radical Politics, 144, 154–55, 156. This is an issue wrestled with in
Leon Trotsky et al., The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1977). On thinking this through regarding the United
States, see Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, A Freedom Budget for All
Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the
Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2013).
About the Author

Ashtyn Marino

Paul Le Blanc is a professor of history at La Roche College, has written on and
participated in the US labor, radical, and civil rights movements, and is author of
such books as Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience, and Lenin and the
Revolutionary Party. He has also edited a volume of Lenin’s writings, entitled
Revolution, Democracy, Socialism. Other books include A Short History of the
U.S. Working Class and Work and Struggle: Voices from U.S. Labor Radicalism.
In addition, he has coauthored, with economist Michael Yates, the highly
acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the
Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today.